


Theme and Variations: War

by ninemoons42



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, Blind Character, Covert Operation, Disabled Character, F/M, Inspired by Music, Inspired by a Movie, Intelligence & Counterintelligence, M/M, Minor Character Death, Morse Code, Revenge, Slow Build, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-17
Updated: 2014-06-17
Packaged: 2018-02-05 01:57:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 17
Words: 95,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1801207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Erik Lehnsherr is a musical prodigy and a man destined for great things and great stages. But his life is shattered by a terrible accident that leaves him blind and trying to find his way back to his life, his music, and his place in the world.</p><p>Then he meets Charles Xavier, an agent of Section 8 of the Military Intelligence Directorate of Providence, and he finds himself listening in to clandestine radio transmissions and clicking Morse code, and these sounds are part and parcel of a war that can only take place in the shadows and the hidden places of history.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> title: Theme and Variations: War  
> Written for Round Three @ [X-Men Big Bang](http://xmenbigbang.livejournal.com/)  
> author: [ilovetakahana](http://ilovetakahana.livejournal.com/) / [ninemoons42](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42)  
> artists: [madsmurf](http://madsmurf93.tumblr.com/) & [arisupaints](http://arisupaints.tumblr.com/)  
> verse: While the main characters and pairing for this story come from _X-Men: First Class_ , it also takes characters and concepts from the wider multiverse of the X-Men comics, as well as from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (including _Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD_ ). The initial plot set-up and the world of the story are adapted from the 2012 period thriller _The Silent War_ , starring Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Zhou Xun, and Mavis Fan.  
> rating: R to NC-17 for violence, language, and sexual content  
> characters/pairings: Main pairing is Charles Xavier/Erik Lehnsherr. Discussion of Moira MacTaggert/Janos Quested. (Other pairings are spoilers.) The cast, as mentioned above, includes characters from the various X-Men teams and titles, _Captain America: The Winter Soldier_ , and _Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD_.  
>  warnings: One of the main characters is a person dealing with permanent physical disability. Another has experienced familial abuse in his past and is dealing with long-term mental repercussions from his chosen line of work in the present. Several characters use strong language. There is graphic violence leading to character deaths or injuries, as well as themes or scenes of abduction and torture.  
> Author's notes, credits, and acknowledgements appear at the end.
> 
> ART LINKS  
> [madsmurf's graphics](http://s1119.photobucket.com/user/madsmurf93/library/xmbb-round-3) [password: cherik] | [arisu's art](http://arisupaints.tumblr.com/post/89077838772/theme-and-variations-on-war-erik-lehnsherr-is-a)
> 
> PLAYLISTS  
> [extended play mix](https://8tracks.com/madsmurf93/theme-and-variation-war-erik-charles) | [long play mix](http://tape.ly/theme-and-variations-on-war)

Brick and mortar and stone, closing in on him. 

He can hear his footfalls, rapidfire panicked, and he draws a shallow breath that only makes the pain in his side throb more wildly. Like a lance thrust into his lungs, so he can’t get the air he needs, so he can’t run any faster, when he needs to escape.

It’s not even his own life he’s worried about.

Information in his pockets, the corner of a strip of paper poking out of the lining of his suit trousers. One more piece of the puzzle. No such things as keys to the puzzle; neither counterintelligence nor codebreaking works that way, and he knows it, has had it pounded into his head over and over again, till he thinks he might finally be grasping the real truth of it, which is this: that there are no such things as ecstatic cries of _Eureka!_ , because there are no such things as catastrophic discovery.

Instead there are ears listening and minds working and bits of data breaking down, gradually, over long nights and agonizing hours. Sifting and sifting and sifting, monumental amounts of patience that may or may not exist, and, eventually, if they’re smart and if they’re lucky and if they’re good, they get something that might break one more piece of the code. They might get one step closer to the cleartext.

But he has to run, now, and he has to survive, just long enough to make sure the strip of paper in his pocket gets to someone who needs to see it and work on it and figure it out.

And he’s in pain, his hand is so wet and hot and starting to get sticky, and the darkness that wraps around him is starting to blur around the edges.

Charles Xavier is out of options.

Doorways just ahead, one of them deep enough to tuck himself into - or at least he hopes that it will be. He half-collapses onto someone’s stoop. There is a bare lightbulb above him, but it, too, is on its last legs: as he watches, the filament wire glows a faint red-orange and then it sputters out entirely, and he’s left in the semidark, waiting.

Footsteps, voices, cold anger. 

Charles grits his teeth, tries to huddle in on himself. His hand comes away from the gouge in his arm with a quiet, unhappy squelch. He can feel the blood flowing sluggishly down his arm, pooling in and on his cuff. He spares a moment to think of the ruined cuff link - it would have to be ruined, since blood can be unusually corrosive, and he’s had more than enough time to know the truth of that - and then he has other things to worry about.

The wound is in his left arm, and most other people would count that a blessing, because most people are right-handed. But Charles’s particular talents lead him to rely on both of his hands - the right for when he has to shoot, the left for when he has to fight in close combat - and now he’s in a position where he doesn’t have a gun and all he has is the stiletto that he has to hold on to in spite of the flowing blood, in spite of the open wound.

The footsteps pursuing him are much closer now. Much slower. Little time remains between now and discovery.

Some part of him hopes that it’s the man Section 8 calls Raider who finds him. A man who hides his ugliness behind a series of social smiles and affability wielded like a blunt weapon. Section 8 wants the man dead, and Charles has one big personal score to settle with him.

Raider is responsible for ferreting out one of the most critical parts of Section 8’s operations. They’ve lost a dozen people to him already, the people who listen in for new transmissions and record them and report them. People they can’t spare and people they’ll have problems replacing.

Including Charles’s own half-brother, the family he hadn’t known he’d had - and now never would.

David Xavier.

There are still too many nights where Charles wakes up screaming, when the memories hold him down in their stranglehold grip: the trucks, and the woman in the bloodstained uniform knocking on his door, and David’s corpse. A brutal way to die: one single large-caliber bullet in his gut. It would have been painful and prolonged and he would have been conscious for a long time. Conscious and screaming. 

And sometimes, in the murk of his nightmares, Charles screams David’s name back, the way he imagines David must have been calling for him.

For his family.

If he can take Raider out, if he can put his stiletto into that man’s heart or eye or throat, he’ll twist the knife and kill the man and call it a fair trade, even if it kills him in the process.

“I know you’re here,” says a voice, now, and Charles can’t help but bare his teeth.

The voice of the man who had been monopolizing the attention of the host at the party that Charles has fled. The voice Charles has been listening to and following around for weeks, months, he’s lost count.

The voice of Raider.

The sweeping arc of a flashlight in use.

Charles blinks, fights to be able to see, and blood coats his fingers and the grip of his stiletto, and he takes a deep breath and forces himself to his knees.

“Come on out,” says Raider, almost gently. “Come on out and show yourself, and I’ll identify you and you’ll die. Something quick. I’m in a hurry tonight.”

Charles hangs on to his knife. Thinks of David hunched over a desk, with pads of paper stacked on one side and half a dozen chewed pencils in a battered wooden cup within easy reach. A multiplication of cups of coffee, stone-cold dregs, accumulating at his elbow. His quiet voice, muttering, sounding so much like their father.

The click of the flashlight being turned off is loud in Charles’s straining ears. 

Raider is thin and angular and has buck teeth. None of those things match the obscenely expensive tuxedo he’d seen earlier. A smug smile, visible in the shadowed night. 

Charles knows he has to make the one and only stroke count.

“Come on,” Raider says again. “Give me back what you took from me, and die here, and I can get back to the party. I left a most interesting conversation hanging and I want to follow it to its end.”

An offered hand.

Charles hisses and tenses and lurches forward, ungainly, but he knows where he’s going now.

The flashlight catches him, a hard blow to the side of his head. It doesn’t matter. Charles murmurs his brother’s name - “David” - and smiles, and he drives the knife into his enemy’s right thigh. It takes everything he still has left in him to follow through, until the blade finally scrapes against bone. 

The sound should have been ugly and jarring. 

It’s music to Charles’s ears.

Raider falls silently, to his credit: his mouth is frozen wide open in the scream that never came out.

Charles takes the stiletto back, but it takes all his strength, and he is barely able to crawl back and away, awkward on his hands and feet. His head is full of clouds and fatigue and stars shaped like pain, and his entire front is now coated in Raider’s blood, and somehow he finds the presence of mind to make sure he still has the information that was the whole point of the mission, before he falls flat on his back. The stoop and the door might as well both be stone beneath and around him.

He wishes he had the strength to get up and spit on the cooling corpse nearby. “That was for my brother, you son of a bitch.”

Charles passes out just as the sirens shatter the night with their eerie two-tone wail, and he doesn’t have time to worry or hope that they’re the right sirens, that they’re his backup coming and not that of Raider.

All that matters is this:

Another enemy down, and hundreds more to go.

///

Charles limps into a familiar part of the Section 8 offices to muted applause, and to Jean standing by just in case he should fall down, and to an envelope sitting on the desk that he occasionally thinks of as his.

He keeps a far more Spartan desk than his brother ever did; there isn’t even an inkwell for the pen he carries around in his pockets, a battered steel-barreled thing, sturdy and scratched up.

But the chair is comfortable, and it is a nice change from several weeks stuck in bed while broken bones set and stitches healed into pale scars, and he sinks into it with a grateful sigh.

Sean scoots his chair over from one of the other desks. His face is a mass of smiles and freckles and red hair. “Good to have you back, boss.”

“For a given value of ‘back’,” Charles says, wryly. “I don’t even have clearance to go back into the field yet.”

“And yet there is a file on your desk,” Jean says.

Betsy joins them, leaning on one corner of the desk. “I hope it’s something interesting.”

“If by _interesting_ ,” Charles says, “you mean _dangerous_.”

“But that’s what we’re here for, isn’t it,” Sean says, rolling his eyes when Jean snorts.

Before Charles can say or do anything, someone else walks in through the door, and everyone around Charles jumps to their feet. Sean even offers a crisp salute.

Charles shakes his head, and keeps gripping the armrests, and doesn’t trust his own knees.

“Charles,” Emma Frost says. Everyone else gets out of her way, and no one questions why she beckons Charles to his feet. “It’s good to see you again.”

“Likewise,” Charles says. He knows his voice is shaking, and leaves it at that. Fatigue still gnaws relentlessly at his nerves. “And again, may I thank you for sending the car for me at just the right moment.”

“I may not be able or allowed to play favorites, Charles, but I do want to look after my people, and you are one of the best that we have got.”

“I do what I can with the missions you send me on.”

That gets him a faint smirk, and Charles is suddenly grateful when she motions him back into his seat.

The facts about Emma Frost are these: that she single-handedly came up with the entire playbook behind Section 8, that she’s actually been able to kill people with her stylish shoes, and that no one in the government or outside of it (or in the undercroft of it) has a better poker face than she does. 

Certainly that calm of hers can be broken - Charles and the others have heard her shout loudly enough, often enough, and been deeply, profoundly grateful that it wasn’t them being reamed out - but no one else has ever, ever seen her break that stony face for something as trivial as a _smile_. 

A moment’s further silence, and then Emma Frost says, “Your country may not know that it owes you a great debt, but you may rest assured that _I_ do.”

“Hence the new assignment, I assume,” Charles says, still trying to get past being thunderstruck at her.

“Yes. Hence the new assignment.” Her hands are still shapely despite the tell-tale crookedness of her knuckles, and she picks up the envelope still sitting on Charles’s desk and offers it to him. “I give it to you in the hope that it will be an easy task.”

Charles finds himself muttering, “No such thing,” as he tears the seal open.

Inside the envelope is a folder, and inside the folder is a dossier. A flutter of onionskin pages, dark ink in neatly monospaced letters.

The only other item in the folder is a small photograph, which Charles passes to Jean when she holds her hand out for it.

“Have I seen this person before?” is the first thing she asks. 

Charles looks up at her. “You’re the one with the photographic memory,” he says, “you tell me.”

She tilts the photograph into a better patch of light. “Does this man have a name?”

“I shall leave you and yours to your excellent devices,” Emma Frost says, then, and strides out.

Charles’s attention is quickly reclaimed by the dossier. “Yes, he does. Erik Lehnsherr. Now that I come to think of it his name does sound familiar. Betsy, could you - ”

“On it,” Betsy says as she strides quickly to the boxes and boxes full of neatly filed newspapers in the back of the office. “What am I looking for?”

“The music and culture sections,” Jean says. “Lehnsherr. That’s a name I haven’t heard for a while. There was quite a big to-do about him, some two or three years ago.”

“What’d he do?” Sean asks as he hauls his portable typewriter over. Tell-tale sounds of flexing and knuckling as he gets ready to take notes. “Drink too much, or wreck a concert hall, take a hammer to someone or something?”

“Hardly.” Jean turns the photo in his direction, and Charles raises an eyebrow at the dark-tinted sunglasses. “He was a musical prodigy, until he was blinded.”

Charles’s eyebrow twitches. “Deliberately or accidentally?”

“Unknown,” Betsy says, and drops a handful of yellowing newspaper sections onto the desk. “Car accident, in the dead of the night, just before an important performance for some charitable cause or another. Here’s one of the first reports.” She clears her throat and begins to read from her stack. “Piano prodigy Erik Lehnsherr remains in hospital following the terrible accident of - here’s a date, Jean, exactly three years ago yesterday.”

“Let me guess,” Jean says, “no one saw the car coming, and the driver has not been brought to justice?”

“Not quite.” Charles takes another section from the pile, scans the blurring lines of type. “Apparently the first thing this Lehnsherr did upon waking up was tell people exactly who tried to run him over. That person was literally the last thing Lehnsherr ever saw.”

“And who was it?”

“Anyone we know?” Sean adds.

“All too well.” Charles turns the section around and points to a paragraph. “None other than our old friend Sebastian Shaw.”

“I’ll - just go get those files, shall I?” Betsy asks. 

Charles frowns at the name in the newspaper, and thinks of the man whom Section 8 has been pursuing for years. “Please do.”

“And - I don’t get it,” Sean says. “What is the connection between Lehnsherr and Shaw, other than a hit-and-run that is likely to be true but isn’t going to mean we’ll get to see the scumbag finally tossed into a jail cell?”

Finally, Charles picks up the top sheet of the dossier. Underneath the usual EYES ONLY headers is a brief biography of Erik Lehnsherr, but he skips past that to the box near the bottom, which is filled with Emma Frost’s tightly legible shorthand.

_Section 8 was established in order to defend the people of Providence from malicious elements based in or around the semi-hostile nation of Genosha. It is the agency’s task to uncover the links between these malicious elements, and to find their backers, through use of counterintelligence strategies. Sebastian Shaw, codename ‘Hornet’, has long been suspected to be one of the main players working against Providence. With elections looming, we expect Shaw/‘Hornet’ to step up his activities, and we need to intercept his messages and signals quickly._

_Erik Lehnsherr has a grudge against Sebastian Shaw, as he blames the man for the accident that took his eyesight. This could be used as leverage to allow him to work for Section 8._

“They mean to put him in the Morse group,” Charles says quietly. “A musical prodigy, who was going to be making his living by his chosen instrument.”

“The piano,” Betsy supplies, helpfully.

“Which means - what? He can hear things maybe the rest of us can’t?” Sean says.

“Seems implausible,” Jean mutters as she fixes herself a cup of coffee. “But then, Section 8 in and of itself is implausible. When do we get moving, Charles?”

“As soon as you can complete the dossier and get me a cup of something to settle my nerves,” Charles says. “Let’s just hope I don’t have to, I don’t know, chase this Erik Lehnsherr down, or something of the sort. I don’t think my knees could take the strain.”


	2. Chapter 2

A clock chimes seven times, and Erik Lehnsherr gets up. He folds his blankets, runs fingers over the creased sheets, beats his pillows back into some semblance of not-flat.

He reaches for his nightstand. There is only one item on it: a pair of sunglasses. He cleans them on his shirttail, and puts his feet into a pair of soft slippers with worn-down soles. 

As he sits up he shuffles his feet, several times, and listens intently for the echoes.

Perhaps what his ears tell him is true, and his room has not been disturbed in the night, but it is always better to check, and it will only take a moment.

Erik pats his hands over the rest of his bed, smoothes out some of the creases. The posts at the foot of the bed are cool to the touch. He will have to carry a coat today.

Hanging by its braided loop of leather from one of the bedposts is a cane, and he reaches out for it. The loop goes around his right wrist. With the cane, the room becomes more navigable, and he can more easily find the door to the lavatory, where he performs his morning ablutions.

The water, like the bedpost, is cool on his hands, bracingly so, and he puts his arms around himself and shivers for a few moments when he’s done brushing his teeth. He can’t help but be cold. It’s something that hit him, almost literally, soon after he lost his sight, and he’s had to take some pains to make sure he can stay warm.

On the wall next to the lavatory hang today’s clothes, and the cane allows him to find the basket underneath, for his clean laundry. A new pair of boxer shorts, and a fresh undershirt. A pair of warm and heavy trousers, and a set of suspenders. The button-up shirt is a little worn, and a little napped, but it’s soft against the skin of his shoulders. On the last hook there’s a sweater vest, which he gratefully tugs on; and below the hook is a comfortable pair of leather shoes. 

He picks the cane back up and navigates along the wall, turns the corner. Here is the last table in his room. At night, this table is where he eats his simple meals. He feels along the polished top to find the battered satchel in which he carries his few things. The little leather coin purse is reassuringly heavy in his hand. He picks up his wallet, next, and counts out the neatly sorted and folded bills. He has more than enough money for today’s expenses.

Perhaps he will treat himself to a nice lunch today. He looks forward to soup and a sandwich and a second cup of coffee. 

He left his jacket in a heap next to the satchel, and he tucks his cane underneath one arm to shake the creases out of the corduroy. 

His ears catch the sound of something flapping and falling out of one of the jacket’s pockets, and he stops, thinks, puts the jacket on first.

Then he drops to one knee, gropes around on the floor. His fingers close on a scrap of paper. Longer than it is wide, and perforated in what seems to be some kind of logical pattern. It both feels and doesn’t feel like Braille to him. He doesn’t know what the message could be, if indeed there is one.

He takes his cane in one hand again, and holds on to the strip of paper in the other, and he thinks about the previous day, when he’d - found the paper? Had it given to him? Both possibilities make sense to him. After all, he’d reached out for Janos’s hand when it had been offered in support, and when Janos left, he was still holding on to the paper. 

He hopes that he can meet Janos today, and return the piece of paper to him.

Another set of chimes, coming in through his window. Eight chimes. He’ll be late to his first appointment if he doesn’t hurry. He doesn’t want to miss out on the possibility of breakfast, either, so he drops the piece of paper into his trouser pocket and picks up his satchel. 

Keys, hanging up on a small hook next to the door. He steps out, locks the door, double-checks the locks, before dropping his keys into his bag.

The cane lets him know he has the corridor to himself. He can hear all kinds of conversation and music and discussion and silence behind the doors that he passes. A dozen flats on the third floor. He just happens to have the smallest.

The muffled barking of a dog, and the laughter/scolding of its owner. Discordant singing, too many sharps and flats in all the wrong places, but enthusiastic all the same. The shuffle of playing cards and the clink-clink of dishes being washed. 

Footsteps approaching, and Erik takes a long step to the right. His shoulder touches the wall and something that feels like a door jamb.

“Good morning, Mister Erik,” someone says, from a few feet away, in front of him and low to the ground. 

That lets him know who’s talking to him, although the smells of bubble gum and fresh laundry are also vital clues. “Hello, Ilyana,” Erik says, smiling in the girl’s general direction. “How are you today?”

Ilyana sniffs and coughs, several times, before responding, and Erik almost steps toward her, but he feels her hand on his wrist first. “Not very well,” she croaks after she takes a deep and shaky breath. “Got a cough. Can’t go to school.”

Erik winces and takes her hand, holds it very carefully. “I’m sorry to hear that. You should go home and get some rest.”

“No, I have to stay out here in the corridor, because Piotr’s cleaning the house and I’ll feel worse in there.”

“Because of all the dust.” Erik nods. “Of course.”

“I wish you could stay here,” she says.

Erik lets her lean on him for a moment. “I wish the same thing. I would offer you some tea with honey and lemon in it; that would make you feel better. But today I have work.”

“You can visit me later, when you come back.”

“I think I will. I can tell you about what happened to me today.”

Ilyana laughs and the sound comes out as a rasp. She tries to get her arms around his waist, and fails. Erik pats her shoulder and ruffles her hair. “See you later, Mister Erik.”

“See you later, Ilyana,” Erik says.

He is still smiling as he taps his way down the stairs, as he follows the curves and meanders of the sidewalk until he gets to the corner and the bright cheerful smell of fruits and vegetables and flowers. The steady clamor of voices all around is vaguely, strangely reassuring: mothers talking to their children and to their husbands, and men and women gossiping on the sidewalk, and boys and girls making plans to go to the movies or eat ice cream after school.

It’s nothing like the concentrated hush and musical whispering that he’d known and joined and been part of when he was at school.

“Ho, is that you, Erik Lehnsherr?” calls a hoarse voice, the edges just barely smoothed down by the weight of long years. “Come to say good morning?”

Erik maneuvers in the direction of the speaker, and stops when his cane taps against a series of wooden struts. He puts a hand out to touch the shelves, and his fingertips skim - barely - against rounded forms, small and fragrant and shapely. “Good morning, Mr Hammond. What’s good today?”

“Everything’s good here, you know that,” is the cheerful response. “But if I really had to choose, I’d take some of the plums. Smell like a springtime garden dusted with sugar today.”

“That sounds very good,” Erik says, and fishes in his satchel for his coin purse. “I will take your advice, and three of those plums.”

“Excellent.” 

But the twist of paper he receives is wrapped around four plums, and he tries to give the extra piece back. “I couldn’t possibly - ”

“Oh yes I can and I will,” Mr Hammond says with a laugh.

“Thank you,” Erik says, and he wipes the extra plum on his jacket and bites into it. Cool juices, sweet and tart distilled together in sunlight, sticky where the extra drops dry quickly on his hand. 

He eats another plum as he walks toward the bus stop, and stows the rest in his satchel for later. Perhaps he’ll offer them to Ilyana.

Another exchange of coins, this time for a bus ticket to one of the northern suburbs, and he stands just a few inches away from the oversized glass windows. The sunlight shifts and slants against him, and he rocks gently as the bus stops-and-starts its way through the remnants of the morning rush hour.

The driver calls Erik’s stop and he excuses himself past a knot of what sounds like schoolchildren chattering about multiplication tables. It takes him a moment to get his feet back under him, and he still rolls a little from side to side as he tries to remember the directions he’d been given for today’s appointment.

He turns a series of corners, puts his hand out when he feels a certain warmth at his side - and there’s a brick wall, and he can feel the shift of sunlight and shade above him and on his feet. Mortar and smoothed ceramic against his fingertips, the occasional crystalline edge. 

The brick wall ends at a wrought-iron fence.

He stops when the cane lets him know he’s approaching someone. 

“Hello?” Erik asks.

If the location is entirely new to him, the voice that answers him is one he knows well. “Hello, Mr Lehnsherr,” says Warren Worthington III. “I hope you didn’t have a hard time getting here. It’s not the usual place, I know - ”

“It’s an adventure,” Erik says, evenly. “One of your newest acquisitions?”

“Oh, no, quite the opposite. May I take your arm?”

Erik gropes for his host’s hand, and holds on carefully to the offered elbow. He tucks his cane away under his other arm, skillfully managing the length of it so he doesn’t trip himself up. “Thank you.”

“Not at all.” A long low creak of a moan, as of metal on the move, and Erik thinks they must pass through some kind of gate that is overgrown with ivy and other vines because he can instantly feel the shift in the surrounding air - cooler, more fragrant, laden with the fresh smells of growing things. 

“There’s a step here, please watch out,” Worthington says. 

Erik follows the other man’s lead, and listens for the bright echo of his footsteps on - marble, it sounds like. Marble with some kind of overhead presence, which makes him think of a dome, or an archway. 

When they stop a moment later, Erik can hear the soft noise of a heavy door being pulled open, and he can smell - dust, undercutting the stink of cleaning agents. His footsteps sound strangely muffled. When he reaches out with his free hand his fingertips brush against polished wood, but next to that is cloth, draped and silencing. “This place - it’s not new, you said,” he says. 

“I spent a few years in this house, when I was growing up,” Worthington says. “But then I had to stay at the places you’re already familiar with, and had to leave this one behind.”

Erik snaps his fingers the next time they come to a stop. Some of the echoes are muffled and some are clear; the room sounds large, full of objects covered in cloth. “No one’s been here for a while?”

“As you can no doubt tell. There was a point at which the family nearly agreed that we might have to sell this property. Thankfully we were talked out of it.”

Another transition. This time, the first thing Erik notes about it is how the outside seems to be coming in: birds singing in trees, the gurgling of 

some kind of water feature, the same scent of ivy and new growth. 

Worthington stops in a patch of sunlight that Erik immediately shuffles forward into.

“If you take a step back and to the left you’ll find the chair,” Worthington says. “I must first bore you with a few explanations before leaving you to 

your work. Will you take tea?”

“Please,” Erik says. The cane tells him where the chair is and he sits down, carefully. The cushions smell of warmth and the last traces of a good dusting.

He listens attentively as Worthington pours the tea and offers him a cup. The tea smells of good earth and, faintly, of berries and chocolate.

“Milk? Lemon?”

“No, thank you.” Erik takes a sip, and another, and nods. 

A quiet splash and a soft crunching noise, and then the sounds of someone brushing fingertips against cloth. “Excuse me,” Worthington says. “I have been up since six, and I can’t actually remember if I had breakfast.”

“I have plums, if you like,” Erik offers.

“Perhaps one, later, thank you. Now, to business. I do not know if you had heard that my mother will be remarrying?”

Erik shakes his head.

“Well, now you know. She’s expressed a desire to come and live in this house after the honeymoon, which is why it’s fallen to me to make sure that all is in order. That includes the grand piano in the next room.”

“How long has it been,” Erik asks, “since the house was closed?”

“Years,” and now Worthington sounds apologetic. “That piano will sound like a fright when you get your hands on it.”

“All the more reason for me to do so,” Erik says. “The sooner I can figure out everything that’s gone wrong with it, the sooner I can get to fixing it, correct?”

“Correct, Mr Lehnsherr. Still, there is no excuse for leaving such a fine instrument to decay.”

“If we can save it, we will.”

Worthington chuckles, sounding chastised. “I have all faith in your ears and your hands, sir.” A pause, and a click. “Would you like to get started?”

Erik nods, and finishes his tea, and gets carefully to his feet. “By all means.”

The next room, too, is filled with warmth. The echoes of his footsteps allow him to orient himself, and to find the great weight and presence of the grand piano. 

The bench is angled slightly into sunlight. Padded in velvet. Erik dusts it off absently with his free hand. “Is it open?”

“Yes,” Worthington says.

Before he sits down Erik puts one hand on the frame of the instrument and walks around it. While the piano has been cleaned and polished he can feel that it has also been used: scratches and dents in the surface. That makes him smile. He likes it when he can interact with something that’s been used, 

that’s been loved, that’s been part of someone’s time and perhaps their creative impulses.

He’s had friends who composed into the dead of the night, fingers brushing almost constantly against the keys so that even when they were writing there was still a source of soft almost-music, waiting to be caught up and followed. He’s known people who weren’t musically inclined but who liked to use the piano as a makeshift desk, sketching or scribbling until their hands were covered in graphite and ink.

When he finishes his round he sits down on the bench. He feels for the rack that would prop up a user’s sheet music, pulls it to its upright position, and lays his cane against it.

He doesn’t have to see the keyboard to know where middle C is. That knowledge has never left him, not even in the darkest days and deepest nights of his despair, when he first lost his eyesight. Even then, he could still orient his hands properly, still attempt to play unheard music on an unseen keyboard.

This keyboard feels very real. The keys are cool to his fingertips. He squares his shoulders, takes a deep breath, looks in what he thinks must be Worthington’s direction. “Well, here we go.”

“Be kind, Mr Lehnsherr,” Worthington jokes, weakly.

Erik strikes middle C.

Despite the discordant sound that fills the room and lingers, on and on in a way that makes Erik think of holding on for dear life, he can’t entirely wince. 

“Years,” he asks, curiously, “since this house was closed, you said? Since the piano was played?”

“The piano had long been abandoned before we moved out,” Worthington says quietly.

That makes Erik smile, and he strikes the same key again. 

Buried beneath the incomprehensible cacophony of neglect and disuse is a pure and rising whisper of a once-powerful voice, that once sang at full strength, and can be made to do so again. 

“Do you know what I’m hearing, Mr Worthington?” Erik asks, and he doesn’t let the other man answer. “I can hear the voice of this piano. As it originally was. That voice still exists, and I can make it sing again. It won’t be easy, but it can be done. I give you my word on that.”

Erik runs his fingers over the keys, improvising, and the sound he produces is more screech than song, but that’s the only bad part. The strings in disarray and disrepair. Everything else seems to be in order. He won’t know for sure until he starts digging into the harmonies, until he loses himself in the chords and the tones. The point, he thinks, is that here is something beautiful and something that ought to be used, and he can bring it back. 

With the echoes of the neglected piano still running inside his head, Erik takes his hands from the keyboard, gropes around for the lid, and brings it gently down over the keys. The movement produces a quiet click that fills the room. It makes him nod, and rise to his feet, and feel around for his cane. “I’ll take the job,” he says.

Worthington’s sigh of relief is loud and gusty and entirely expected. “Thank god. When can you begin, and how long do you think it will take to get the piano back in working order?”

Erik taps his cane against his leg for a few moments, thinking. “How often will I be able to come here? You mentioned that the house itself is under renovation. I must not be disturbed while I am at work.”

“Of course not,” is the response. “The workers are not always here, in any case, as they have other assignments themselves. Will Tuesdays through Thursdays suit you?”

Erik nods. “Then the work will take perhaps four or five weeks. No more than six. When is your mother to come back from her honeymoon?”

“As it has not been three weeks since the engagement, Mr Lehnsherr, I do not think you need to worry about that now. I will of course let you know how things are going. But right now you will have all the time that you will need, even if it should take more than six weeks.”

“Then I will return next week,” Erik says, tapping his way forward in order to reach Worthington. He offers the man his hand. “I thank you in advance for allowing me to work on something like this.”

That gets him another rueful chuckle, and a firm handshake. “It sounds like jangling to me right now, but I will take your word for it.”

///

As he finishes off his last bit of sandwich and reaches for the last plum, Erik finds himself pausing in the still of his little room.

He bows his head, tilts it this way and that.

The rooms around him are full of noise and voices, and he shuts them out very carefully, until he’s surrounded by self-imposed silence.

Somewhere in the dark, in the back of his mind, there is a high trembling note, and it is followed by another and another, and perhaps there might be a song in them, or nothing more than a fleeting faraway melody.

When he was a child, he’d heard songs in the rush and gurgle of water down the drain as his father washed the pots and pans. He’d composed little trills from the steady whir of the sewing machine at which his mother labored from sunrise till sunset. He’d followed the music of the winter wind rattling at the sealed windows and whistling down the old crumbling brick of the chimney. 

He remembers playing those little improvised pieces for his piano tutor. As a child he’d not paid much attention to the wide eyes and the shock in the lines around her mouth; as an adult, now, he can still remember the respect in her shaking voice as she whispered anxiously to his parents.

Whispers that led to better and better pianos, to one stage and then to another, and Erik remembers performing with his back to the audience, black and white keys filling up his vision, and his fingers moving across those keys.

He pushes his plates and his teacup away now, just a little, just enough to free up the edge of the table. He imagines the keys to Worthington’s neglected grand piano as they had felt under his fingers, and there is relief in him, and disbelief at the same time, as he grasps at the melody in his mind: tentative, faltering.

Staccato, playful, quick and tinkling and tickling, like Ilyana’s footsteps tripping unsteadily up the corridor, like the skitter of breadcrumbs and the stone of the plum falling back onto a battered plate.

The melody loops around in Erik’s mind, again, again, and he curses and he sweats and he for a moment desperately wishes for his sight. He wishes he could find a pencil and some paper. Two sets of five horizontal lines linked by a brace. The curves of the treble clef and of the bass. Ledger lines, accidentals, notes and rests linked to each other.

Since he has no way to record what he is now doing - what he hasn’t done in such a long time - all he can do is remember, and remember he does: he “plays” the simple melody, over and over again, whistles it until he’s out of breath and he has to gasp and start over, and in his mind’s eye his fingers dart over the keys over and over again, until his actual fingers crash against the edge of the table and he stops dead, in pain, and in shock, and in happiness.

He hasn’t composed a single thing in the years since the car accident. Since he lost his sight.

He cries, and he covers his face in his hands, and he is trembling and grateful and shivering all over again.


	3. Chapter 3

The packet that had once contained sugar cubes falls to rough shreds in Erik’s hands.

He can hear anxious breathing. His own and that of the woman sitting nearby. In addition, she sounds like she’s close to tears. He reaches haltingly across the table for her, and lets her latch on to him. Enough to almost make his fingers hurt. He doesn’t want to let go.

“I have no idea where Janos is,” Angel murmurs for the third time, or the fourth. 

Erik winces, and pulls on her hand as gently as he can. “Come and sit here with me,” he says.

She doesn’t let go of his hand, though it must hinder her movement from the chair opposite into the one next to his.

In his pocket Erik can still feel the piece of paper that he’d gotten from Janos, which is now the last piece of communication that either of them has received from him. He gropes for it now with his free hand, and offers it to Angel. “Does this mean anything to you?”

There’s a pause before she returns it to him, as carefully as he’d offered it to her. “I’ve never seen anything like it before,” she says, eventually. “When did you get it? What does it have to do with him?”

“I received it from him,” Erik says. “The last time I saw him, eight days ago. That was the day before I took the job with the grand piano. I don’t know if he meant to give the paper to me. All I remember is that after we shook hands I was left holding it.”

“But since there’s no way we can read it - ”

“- Then there’s no way of knowing what’s really going on.”

That makes Angel sob again. Erik offers her his handkerchief. 

“I just want to know that he’s all right,” she whispers.

“I wish that there was some other way I could help you.”

“Thanks for the support, Erik.”

“And you’ll have it, for as long as you need it. He is my friend, and you are my friend, and you have both treated me so well, as though I had truly been a brother to both of you. You have both been immeasurably kind to me, which gives me the right to worry about you two.”

That, at least, gets him a quiet, watery chuckle. A brief moment of levity.

When the clock in the coffee shop tolls the hour Erik sighs, and fumbles in his satchel for his wallet, feeling a strange roiling mixture of reluctance and eagerness. He doesn’t want to leave his friend alone. He wants to sit at Worthington’s piano. He wants to protect her. He wants to coax it back to tuneful life. 

“I’ve already paid,” Angel says, after a moment. “It was the least I could do. I did call you out here, after all, and you’ve had to deal with me being in a panic.”

“We could have gone halves,” Erik says, instead of anything else. 

“Next time,” she says.

“All right.”

“You’ll let me know the instant you hear anything,” Erik adds when they’re standing out on the sidewalk. 

“Who else do I have to share the news with?” Angel asks, but not unkindly. 

He squeezes himself into the very corner of the space of what he knows is sheltered by the awning outside the coffee shop’s window. 

Someone else sneezes when they pass by, trailing splashing water, and the sound is both muted and clear to his ears, despite the roar of the rain and the moan of the wind.

“Beastly weather to be out in,” Angel mutters, and he can hear her struggling with something. “How do you manage, Erik? You’re carrying all that, plus an umbrella - ”

“I don’t have one.”

“Then how are you going to walk around out there without catching your death of cold?”

He extracts a battered hat from the deepest pocket of his coat, and puts it on. He touches its brim and makes sure it covers his face and his sunglasses. “Like this.”

She clucks her tongue at him. “Are you sure?”

“It’s how I’ve always managed. But I thank you for your concern.”

“I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to you, too.”

“I’ll be fine, Angel.” He inclines his head in the direction of his voice, then buttons up his coat and turns up his collar, and grasps his cane and the bag that contains his tuning gear more firmly.

There are too many echoes in Erik’s ears as he taps his way down the sidewalk, heading for the nearest bus stop. To him the few other pedestrians sound like a multitude of other walkers.

On the other hand, he can hear his surroundings much more clearly, and even when he steps down into the street to avoid a slow-moving group the echoes of the rain give him more than enough warning for when he needs to get out of the way of a car, a cart, another pedestrian.

The bus that he gets on is packed and humid and full of irritated muttering. He braces his feet, and holds on with grim determination to his things and to a handrail, and tries to calm himself by thinking about new music.

Somehow he hangs on to that melody until the bus careens to a stop, at which point he loses the music and the possibilities. It makes him sigh, and swear 

under his breath.

The voice that whispers to him, then, is completely unexpected. “Would you like to take my seat?”

“Yes?” It comes out as a question.

“May I take your elbow?” the voice asks, next, and Erik nods. 

A quick pull, and he’s sitting on the edge of someone else’s seat, and that someone else is a warm and steady presence at his side.

“Thank you,” Erik says, once he’s pulled his wits back about himself.

“I would have done something earlier,” the voice says, “but I was asleep. Bad habit for a man who travels on a bus, I know. I risk the chance of missing my stop. But I have always been able to find my way about in this city, so I suppose I am doing well enough for myself.”

“You’re not from around here,” Erik says.

“I wasn’t born here,” the voice says. Movement that feels like a shrug. “But it is not my first time staying here. May I ask you where you’re heading?”

Erik tilts his head in the direction of the voice. “To work,” he says. “You?”

“The same. I’m Charles. Pleased to meet you.”

“Erik,” Erik says. He offers his hand.

Charles shakes hands firmly and briefly, and chuckles afterwards.

“Something funny?” Erik asks.

“It’s a damn rotten day to be going to work, that’s all.”

“Ah. Is it? I hadn’t noticed.”

Charles laughs again. “You must like your job, to speak of this rain as if it were a mere inconvenience.”

Erik shrugs. “It is. At least where I’m going I will be able to do something I like doing, and I will be someplace dry to boot. If you are headed to a place of drudgery and, hmm, clock-watching, might I suggest looking for a new job.”

“I believe I’ll take your advice,” Charles says, and then he adds, after a moment, “This is my stop. I hope to see you again soon, Erik.”

“Thanks once again,” Erik says, and he shuffles out of the way to let Charles leave, before he settles fully into the vacated seat. 

The warmth that Charles leaves behind is startling in its fierceness, even when Erik tilts his head back.

When it’s his turn to get off, Erik reluctantly gets to his feet and steps back out into the rain, but he carries the details around with him anyway: the easy warmth of Charles’s voice. The knowing way in which he laughed - the kind of knowing that made Erik think about sharing the joke instead of being the butt of it. The seeming strength in his hand - and at the same time the decided crookedness of his fingers, and the fact that he might have sunken knuckles.

Erik’s never met anyone who’d abuse their hands so, and he spends the rest of the walk to the Worthington house wondering about the sort of work that Charles might or might not do. 

He’s so distracted that he almost walks right past the gate - the only thing that makes him turn back is a surprised “Mr Lehnsherr?”

Erik stills, and turns around, and taps his way back to the voice. “Is that you, Mr Worthington?” he asks. “I had not expected that you would be here today.”

“Neither did I, to be honest,” is the man’s response. “Today, however, I have had to be afoot on business that is not truly my own, and so I have been running about the city, and this was the nearest house that I could run to.” 

“Well, then, small blessings.” And Erik follows him down the familiar path towards the house. At the door, he takes off his wet overthings with not a little relief, and threads his way back to the room with the grand piano.

When he hears movement coming his way, he exchanges tuning fork for tuning hammer and says, “Please mind my tools, thank you very kindly.”

“I’ve managed to scrounge up some soup,” Worthington says. The sound of his voice is accompanied by the muted clash and clatter of dishes and cutlery, and Erik turns his head in the other man’s direction when he catches a whiff of savory smells. “The rain’s coming down harder; a cup of tea isn’t going to be enough to warm us up. Not without the heating. I really thought I’d had it restored by now. Will you excuse me while I make some phone calls?”

Erik cuts through the distracted muttering with a polite word. “First you eat, then you go back to the work of restoring this house, as I to mine of restoring this piano.”

The soup is peppery and thick and there are bits of herb in every mouthful, as welcome on Erik’s nerves as Charles’s warm voice had been.

After a moment, the hand with the spoon stills, halfway between Erik’s mouth and the bowl, and he finds himself wondering where that thought had come from.

///

At approximately the same moment, Charles hums absently to himself - a tune for a piano, he thinks, something wistful and oddly determined at the same time - as he walks a meandering path toward an ornate building with stained-glass windows on the second and third floors. The front doors hang wide open. As he watches, another sleek car screeches up to the curb; the passenger door is flung open, and another hooded and huddled shape dashes up to the foyer, hems flapping with the movement.

He’s good at being inconspicuous, but right now, he’s almost glad he knows how to move around in rather more rarefied surroundings than the windowless rooms and bulletproof hidey-holes he’s more often found himself in.

It’s easy to stride up to the door and look expectantly at the bellhop: the perplexed look on the man’s face dissolves when Charles quirks an imperious eyebrow at him, when Charles thrusts his furled umbrella in the man’s direction and beckons him over to take his rain-dashed coat.

The three-piece suit helps, too: not a thread out of place. Charles has even made sure that every link on the chain connecting his watch to its pocket is polished to a high shine, and that there is a secure place for his stiletto, hidden in a reinforced panel of his waistcoat that isn’t likely to be searched. 

All right, so the rain outside means his trouser hems will drip a little, but that is already true for almost every gentleman standing in this elegant lobby, and no one will look twice at another set of damp footprints, except perhaps for the people who are in charge of keeping the lush and ostentatious carpets clean.

Charles tips the bellhop and runs a hand through his damp hair, and heads to the tea room: he takes in the dignified clink and clatter of porcelain and silver, the hush of cultured voices tittering about petty indiscretions and insignificant social missteps, and doesn’t miss home at all. 

Once upon a time, this was the only kind of place he’d ever known, when he was running around indignantly in short pants, beneath the complete and utter disregard of his mother in her silks and furs and jewels. How he’d chafed at the watered-down tea and the biscuits that were always taken away before he could eat his fill. How he’d hated the crustless sandwiches that didn’t even have proper fillings like peanut butter or marmalade. 

How he’d hated the knowing eyes and the stuffy self-importance of the men and women who came to see his mother. How he’d hated the way she smiled at them, all sweetness and charm, and then gone on to complain about them for hours on end once the tea had all been drunk and the last guest had been ushered out the door.

He would have preferred no company at all over those kinds of people. He would have preferred to be left alone among his books and his toys, where he could get gingerbread crumbs all over everything and no one would mind.

But then, because of those cold and formal teas, he knows how to sit down and how to navigate the cutlery at his place and how to lift a fingertip to get the attention of a passing waiter. He knows what kind of tea to ask for - something earthy and spicy at the same time, to fight off the day’s chill - and he knows how to eat scones in a polite and dignified manner.

Though he does have to admit that he cribbed that last part from Betsy, and rather shamelessly at that. His mother might have had delusions of social standing and consequence, but his colleague is descended from an actual aristocratic family, and presumably they’d known about such things.

Charles has finally managed to stop shivering, about halfway through his third cup of tea, when there’s a throat-clearing sound from very close by. He knows this voice. He leaps to his feet and turns.

The woman standing by his table is wearing fur and an extravagant suite of jewelry and a pair of silken gloves, but Charles only has eyes for the amused smile and the lines around her eyes. “Hello, Miss MacTaggert,” he says, and hands her into the seat opposite his with a bow and a flourish. “To what do I owe the honor of your presence?”

Moira MacTaggert’s smile deepens, grows more knowing. “Hello, Charles,” she says, and before she can say anything else the flustered maître d’ hurries up to the table and presents her with a different menu.

Charles buries his grin in his teacup.

“Where was I, before we were so rudely interrupted?” she asks after the staff fusses with the flowers and napkins on the table, apparently for her benefit. “Oh, yes, I was about to talk about you. I heard you were in town and had to come and see you with my very own eyes.”

“That’s very flattering,” Charles says with a chuckle. 

“I should say it is, considering who passed on that information.” She winks at him, tucks a stray strand of hair behind her ear, twists one of the rings on her left hand. 

Her tea arrives, then, and in the end she has to direct a slightly displeased smile in the direction of the waiter in order to make him sweat and cringe and back away. 

In a lower voice, she asks, “How is everyone?”

Charles leans in with a different smile of his own. Puts his hand near hers on the table. Others will see them as exchanging quiet flirtations. “They are well, and working hard. Jean and Betsy are here with me for now. I have a feeling we’ll be needing their talents before all of this is over.”

“You do seem to be the best kind of person for a job that requires not a little persuasion.”

He inclines his head to her. “And you? How are things on your end?”

She sips from her tea, slices one of the little sandwiches on her plate in half. Dabs at her mouth with the napkin. “That’s part of the reason why we’re meeting, to be honest,” she says, and her smile never wavers but now there are ugly lines around her eyes. “I seem to be missing a man, and you know how I hate it when that happens.”

Charles winces, fractionally. “That does sound like it might become a problem, though I’ve no doubt you can do your work even if you’re short-handed.”

“Of course I can, what do you take me for?”

He nods. “I don’t know what help I can give you, since I’m here on my own tasks, but I _will_ help. Who is missing, and what happened to him?”

“I was hoping you’d say that,” she says. She takes a deep breath. “Janos Quested. Telegraph man. He’s been stationed in this place for a good few years, and Emma Frost apparently asked him to work with me when I got here. She was expecting we’d get hit with a deluge of signals, and we did, and he’s worked beautifully through it all except for the part where he disappeared.”

Charles nods. He’s heard the name before. Quested doesn’t speak much and doesn’t have many friends, but he’s one of the fastest and the most accurate telegraph men Section 8 has anywhere in the country, and his loss would be a great blow to their operations. “How did that happen?”

“That’s the other problem,” MacTaggert says. “As I mentioned - he’s from here, has a few friends, and if I remember correctly, some family. A pretty girl, his sister, perhaps two or three years younger. I’ve had her followed, and she seems to be equally unhappy about him up and disappearing on her.”

He nods again, more grimly this time. “So now we have to consider the part where he might have been disappeared.”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“I’ll have the others look into it,” Charles says. “And I assume you want me to let Emma Frost know.”

“I already sent her a message. All she said was, she hopes he can be found.”

“Not very reassuring.”

“She wouldn’t be Emma Frost if she weren’t pragmatic.”

“Too true.” Charles allows himself a brief, wry chuckle. He pours himself a final cup of tea. “Was there anything else?”

In response, she slides a piece of paper out of her glove. “Latest dispatches,” she says as she hands it over, under the pretense of pushing a plate of pale cream macarons in his direction. “Apparently things in Genosha are a little - strained - right now. We’ve seen something like this before, but that was a long time ago. Nevertheless, the story is familiar enough to be almost expected.” She looks around, surreptitiously, and nods before she lowers her voice further. “Someone or something in their government is spooked enough to put the whole place on what amounts to a war footing. And I’m not talking about half-measures here. Guns by the gross, men and women disappearing very quietly into training facilities. So much activity that we’re having a hard time staying on top of things. Oh, they’re doing it very quietly, and no one’s talking about it - ”

“Except for the part where everyone’s talking about it,” Charles murmurs. “Which means we’re going to need people to listen in, and people to figure out what’s going on.”

“So find my man,” Moira says. “Please.”

“It looks like we must, now. Things just got a lot more urgent.”

“On that we’re agreed.”

Charles gets to his feet, and kisses her hand when she offers it. “Then I’d best be off. There aren’t enough hours in the day, honestly, and the work is never done.”

“You are such a lazy scapegrace,” she says even as she shakes her head, and Charles laughs and hears what she’s really saying. He tips an entirely imaginary hat at her, and turns away.

Even as he affects a languid stroll out of the tea room, even as he murmurs an entirely careless “Thank you” to the same bellhop, Charles’s mind is churning desperately with considerations and possibilities.

He eyes every inch of the streets with new trepidation. He passes laughing children and gossiping men and thoughtful women. They don’t know that they’re in mortal danger; they don’t know that other nations are plotting their demise.

Worse still is the idea that those other nations don’t care about the little distinctions between combatants and non-combatants, and Charles is one moving through crowds of the other, and he’s sworn an oath to protect the non-combatants.

He’s clipped and snappish when he gets back to the safe house where the others are working and watching. 

“Charles, we have news - ”

“And I’ll look at it in a moment, but new tasks first,” he says, inclining his head to Jean in apology. “We’re going to have to move our operation up a few days. The need for new ears just got more urgent.”

“How did you know?” Betsy asks, slightly surprised. “That’s what today’s message says.”

“Moira,” he says, shortly. “Genosha’s at fever pitch, and we need people to pay attention, and the telegraph training course runs for three weeks. We have to start that process immediately, provided our new recruit comes with us, and that means we’ve got to get him.”

“If you’re in a hurry,” Jean says, “we won’t be able to wait for Sean to get here. It’ll have to be just Betsy and me.”

“No, it’ll have to be just Betsy,” Charles says as he drops heavily into a chair. He pinches the bridge of his nose between his thumb and pointer finger. “I need you to look for someone else, Jean.”

“This wasn’t in our orders.”

“No, it wasn’t, but it’s critical now. Moira MacTaggert’s team has lost its telegraph man, and all reports say he vanished here. The two of you’ve likely heard of him. Janos Quested.”

Betsy freezes in the act of sitting down at her telegraph set. “Did I just hear you say - ”

“You did,” Charles says. “You’re familiar with him? What do you know?”

“We came up through the training course together. We were the only two people who got into Section 8, out of about forty people. He - he’s good, Charles, he’s really good. If something’s happened to him - ”

“Let’s sincerely hope not,” Charles says. “The consequences do not bear thinking about, and if you think I’m worried, you should see Moira.” 

He lets a moment pass, and then gets to his feet and watches as Betsy reaches for her machine with slightly shaking hands. “I’m asking you this question just so we’re clear, not because I intend to disparage you, all right?”

“Ask, Charles,” she says.

“Do you want to work with me on getting Erik Lehnsherr, or would you rather be the one to track down Quested, or do you want to bow out completely? Answer me honestly. You have my word I will pass no judgement.”

She closes her eyes, squares her shoulders, lets out a long and controlled breath. “I think,” she says carefully, “that I’ll help you with the Lehnsherr snatch. I’ll watch your back and be your getaway driver. I can do that, at the very least. I would rather not be working on the Quested problem. I’d be too close; he’s a friend, sort of, and I’m not sure I’d trust myself to be objective.” She looks at Jean. “He’s all yours, and I hope you find him, and I hope you find whoever took him and make them _hurt_.”

“Don’t I always?” Jean asks, and she sounds entirely too flippant but there is a darkness to the way she clenches her fists at her sides, and Charles has never been more grateful for the fact that she works _with_ him instead of _against_ him.

Though he still remembers a few hard falls that had come from sparring with her. The memory makes him wince.

“Tell me everything you know about Quested, Betsy,” Jean says, after another moment. “And I’m going to need another map of this city. I hope nothing much has changed since the last time we were here.”

Charles rejoins the conversation. “I can still give you directions to get around.” He snags a chair and drops into it, sitting kitty-corner to Betsy’s telegraph set. 

“Thank you,” Jean says.


	4. Chapter 4

The sun is beating down strongly enough that Erik almost, almost considers reaching into his satchel for his collapsible umbrella; instead he mops his forehead with his already-sodden handkerchief, and comes to a stop, surrounded by the discordant breathing and life of too many people.

Standing at one of the city’s busiest intersections, he’s allowed a rare glimpse of pretty much everyone else who calls this place home as he does. An overwhelming impression of warmth, adding to the rising temperatures, and leaving him almost breathless. Scents and sweat and smoke and salt, and everything underpinned by grease and, strangely, a faint soft idea of blooming flowers.

Erik knows that the shop immediately across the street in the direction he’s heading is a popular diner, though he doesn’t like to eat there, because it’s narrow and cramped and hard to navigate even with his cane. He also knows that immediately behind him there is a short passageway that leads to one of the little markets scattered seemingly at random around the city.

Someone whistles, from the other side of the intersection if the echoes that Erik hears are any indication, and then there’s a low buzz and movement up 

ahead. 

Erik steps lively as he navigates the intersection, and everyone hurries on with him and past him, and because he stays to the left-most side of the flow he manages to avoid coming into contact with too many of the oncoming pedestrians - though the cane is still invaluable, allowing him to maneuver around the possibility of other obstacles. 

The surface beneath his feet changes, slowly, and then all at once: he passes from heat-hard cement to cobbled stones, smoother and far more uneven. He is forced to slow down, and he is forced to rely more heavily on his cane.

The sounds around him, too, flow into a more muted buzz. Softer echoes, fewer of them. He is heading toward the old downtown area of the city, the old center, and every once in a while if he strains his ears he can hear the wind begin to whisper through the branches of trees: one at a time, at first, and then in small clumps.

He allows himself a smile, a slight movement of his mouth, when he catches that tell-tale breeze. It’s not just relief that makes him react the way he does, though the cooling effect is welcome. 

One of the first things he’d ever tried to capture in music was the memory of the wind in the trees that stood next to the house where his mother had grown up. He’d been to the house a handful of times growing up, and sometimes, when he dreams of the past, he can still see the image of sunlight pouring through the row of fixed windows installed just beneath the roof.

But it’s the wind that has stayed with him, all this time, and he thinks about a tune now, one of the many that he’s been keeping in his mind since he started to work on the Worthington grand piano. 

He takes a deep breath, and listens for the sound of cups of coffee and glasses of water, and turns in at the first coffee shop he finds. When he’s welcomed by a quiet, feminine voice, he asks for iced coffee and a secluded table, and sinks gratefully into the sturdy wooden chair that he’s led to.

“Let me just draw the curtains so you won’t get any of that extra sunlight on you,” the woman says, and Erik nods distractedly. He’s too busy trying to get to his notebook. 

Tied to that notebook by a length of worn leather cord is an awl with a blunted point.

In his mind’s eye, Erik pictures a simple stave, with a treble clef at the beginning.

He thinks about his melody, about the trees he’d heard on the way here and the trees he’d once been fascinated by. He thinks about sitting beneath a tree, the hours slipping away, as he dreamed about playing the piano for his parents and for an audience.

He smoothes out a page of his notebook with his fingers, and starts marking out the notes, one after the other. Slowly at first, and then gathering momentum. The stave in his mind wraps around to the next line and the lilting melody continues. 

Simple music, Erik thinks. A steady theme, sweetly playing in his mind. It could be a strong foundation for something else, or it could be something much plainer or much subtler. The possibilities are important.

He almost forgets that he ordered a drink and he has to take care to hold on to the awl when the same server comes back to his table, sets out a pair of 

glasses that clink when she puts them down.

Thirstily Erik gulps at the iced coffee, a quarter of it gone in one swallow, and goes back to his composing.

So absorbed is he in the music in his mind that when he gets to his feet, when he continues on his way, he doesn’t hear the footsteps chasing him until they’re far too close.

A muffled accent, strange to his ears: “We’ve been waiting for you, Lehnsherr.”

He doesn’t have time for the sudden panicked thump of his heartbeat in his ears.

He takes a deep breath, and tries to talk calmly. “I don’t know you, and I don’t have any business with you.”

“We work with...an old acquaintance of yours,” the voice continues. Raspy, hoarse, as if little-used. A woman, Erik thinks, and he instinctively backs up a step.

The sounds of people skittering away. People who don’t want to get involved. People who just want to get on with their lives.

Erik envies them.

“What do you want from me?” he asks.

A ringing footstep, loud on the cobblestones, and his cane finally makes contact: too many curves in the shoe for it to be anyone else but the woman’s. He doesn’t want her to box him in. With his free hand, he gropes blindly behind him - and he grits his teeth when at the farthest extent of his arm his fingertips brush weathered brick. Too close to a wall by far.

He takes a long step to the side, instead, heedless of where his foot might end up, and keeps backing away.

“If you keep going,” the woman says, “you’re going to run into some of my associates, and I assure you they aren’t nice people at all.”

“And _you’re_ supposed to be nice?” Erik manages to snap out.

“I haven’t laid hands on you yet, when I could have,” is the silky response.

“What do you want from me?” he asks again. More loudly. The fear in his own voice makes him wince. He might be trapped but he won’t give in.

“Merely a meeting,” the woman says. “An offer. We have a job that we’d like you to do.”

“I’m busy.”

“Yes, we know that. But we pay better.”

Erik bares his teeth. “And the first step of your recruitment process is to scare people. I’ll pass.”

“I’m afraid we can’t let you do that,” the woman says. “We’ve been sent to find you specifically.”

“No,” Erik says, with far more courage than he currently feels. He badly wishes he could lean on something. Not his cane; it’ll snap under his weight. Not on a wall; that will mean he’s been cornered. He can’t give up, won’t give up, he just wants to lean against something, but he’s running out of options.

“I grow tired of waiting,” the woman says. “Come with us, Lehnsherr - come peacefully, and things will reveal themselves, and you can let go of the music and do what you were truly meant to be doing.”

Erik growls. Shakes his head. 

He listens.

Here is the woman, still advancing on him as he backs away from her. He can now hear the footsteps of whoever’s following _her_. 

He remembers that she mentioned associates.

He has to try and find one of those.

He stops. He pays attention to everything around him. The sigh of the wind recedes from him, as do the lingering effects of the melody he’d been working on.

There is someone directly behind him, now, and Erik pretends to stumble, flail out, and the hand that’s still holding on to the cane makes contact with a muscle-bound wrist.

As he tries to make it look like he’s about to fall down - the poor blind man, who can’t even find his own feet - he reaches into his satchel. His fingers close around the same wooden shape that he’d just been holding on to in the coffee shop.

“Lehnsherr,” the woman says, and now there is a note of real menace in her voice, a point source of dissonance.

It’s now or never, Erik thinks, and he abandons the pretense - he swings himself around the man he’s hanging on to. Gets the man between him and the woman. Clenches his fingers around his awl and pulls it out, smooth movement. 

He has to guess at where the man’s most vulnerable point might be, but as soon as the point of the awl touches bare skin the man freezes anyway. He may or may not whimper. Erik isn’t paying attention to him. He’s still looking in the direction of the woman’s voice.

“I don’t care,” the woman says. “Kill him if that will make you feel better. He’s nothing but hired help to me.”

“In that case you won’t mind me borrowing him so I can get away from you,” Erik says.

The woman sighs, and says, “Take him out for me, please.”

A different voice replies, “With pleasure, Miss Selene.”

Selene. Erik blinks. He’s heard that name before.

But before he can say or do or remember anything else the man he’s been holding on to groans, long and low and quietly, and then he’s so much dead weight in Erik’s arms. Gravity pulls that man down and away, and Erik winces when he hears the man hit the street with a loud thud.

And he can hear the smile in Selene’s voice when she speaks again. “He’s dead, by the way, if you hadn’t already figured it out. And I can do that to everyone else who isn’t me or you. Though I’m having second thoughts about not hurting you. I think I can go against my orders, just a little. I don’t think anyone will mind, so long as you can recover. I warn you I will do it. Now will you come along quietly?”

Erik shakes his head. His hands are unsteady.

A wild, desperate thought forms in his head.

He’d rather be free, for a given definition of free.

Slowly Erik brings the awl up to point at his own temple.

“Don’t you dare,” Selene growls. “I need you alive.”

“And so do I,” says a new voice.

A familiar voice.

Erik nearly drops his awl in surprise, and he casts around in shock, wondering if he’s finally starting to hear things. 

“If I asked you to put the awl down, Erik, would you?” 

Erik reaches out, blindly, and his hand makes contact with a heavy jacket. His fingertips brush against rough strands of hair. 

There’s a hand on his elbow, and he remembers that grip from a few days ago and forces himself to relax, little by little. “You’re the man from the bus,” he says, after a long moment.

“Yes, it’s me. It’s Charles,” says the familiar voice. And: “Please, will you give me the awl?”

Erik hangs doggedly on to his things. “Tell me you’re not here with that Selene woman.”

“I am absolutely not Selene’s friend, Erik, I can tell you that truthfully. I swear it.” Charles drops his voice, just a little, and adds, “I think she looks like she might want to murder me, and then take you away to whatever nefarious thing she’s got planned for you.”

“I don’t want to go with her,” Erik says, “and I don’t want her to hurt you or anyone.”

“Thank you,” Charles says. “Now, please, give me the awl. I will return it to you, I promise; I just don’t like the idea of you pointing it at yourself.”

Erik thinks it over.

He hands Charles the awl.

“Thank you,” Charles says again, and Erik wonders if he’s imagining the little sigh that preceded the words, and wonders what that little sigh could have meant. 

“You’re here to do the same thing I’m doing, Charles Xavier,” Selene growls. “Your precious little Section 8 would be even more foolish than it normally is to pass someone like Lehnsherr up, to let him live his life unmolested. That you’ve come here for him - well, it shows that _someone_ in your so-called agency has a few working brain cells, at the very least.”

“All true,” Charles says. “But unlike you, Selene, I don’t do my recruiting at gunpoint.” He sounds like he could be smiling; Erik thinks of a conversation on a packed bus on a rainy day, and remembers the self-deprecation that had been threaded into the few short words they’d had, shoulder to shoulder on a narrow seat. He remembers the warm echo, faint, of true amusement. “I happen to think it’s rather too, hmm, archaic, I would say. Doesn’t yield the same results as _telling the damn truth_.”

“The truth!” Selene laughs, and the echoes are hideous, grating on Erik’s already fraying nerves. He hears her spit, hears the naked contempt in her voice. “What is truth? Just words to play around with. 

“Don’t get in my way, Charles Xavier, or you’ll regret it.”

Charles chuckles, and all the hairs on the back of Erik’s neck rise straight up and stay up. “No.”

There is something dark and feral in Charles now, and Erik knows he should be taking this opportunity to run, to hide, to get away from them. _Both_ of them. Fear whispers and shivers within him, and he’s starting to get the idea that Charles is just as dangerous as Selene. 

It’s the voice, Erik thinks, though Charles’s response was precisely one word long. His head is spinning; he doesn’t know if he’s getting out of this one at all; and he really, _really_ doesn’t want to fall into Selene’s clutches.

And now he’s beginning to understand, from the affably angry words exchanged between Charles and Selene, that Charles also has plans for him. Plans that Erik knows exactly nothing about. 

For all he knows Charles, and whatever Section 8 actually is, is going to experiment on him or something, though he doesn’t know what they could be looking for in his bones or in his skin or in his nerves.

Still, he’d much rather be with Charles, with someone who talks about true things. 

So when Charles takes a step forward, Erik stays right at his side. 

Charles’s hand is still warm around his elbow. 

“In fact,” Charles says, “I’ll be happy to keep standing right here where I am, where I can stop every single thing you’re thinking of and several you’re going to try. Fair warning, I’m not alone. I’ve got backup.” Here his voice drops to an ominous whisper that has Erik leaning in anyway. “And my backup has got a very big gun trained on you and yours. So believe me when I say this, Selene. For your own good - for your _life_ \- leave. Now.”

There is a long and charged silence, during which Erik can actually hear Selene as she grinds her teeth.

Then she snaps, “ _Fuck_ you.”

Charles sighs, again, so quietly that Erik’s sure he’s the only one who hears it.

And then Charles is suddenly gone from Erik’s side.

When Erik hears the raw _thud_ of flesh striking flesh, he can’t help but flinch back. Can’t help the flare of shock that makes him recoil, though his feet feel like they’ve been nailed to the cobblestones. 

He tilts his head this way and that, desperately following the sounds of the scuffle, the quiet sounds of Charles and Selene in battle. Dull thumps, irregular, mixed in with harsh breaths.

Erik doesn’t often wish he could see, and is often thankful that he can’t - yet he doesn’t know what to feel about this fight, which is taking place because of him. Does he want to be a spectator? Does he want to turn away?

Does he want to run, now?

But before he can think it over Selene gasps, once, and the sound is unexpectedly loud and startling.

Charles’s voice, distorted, is the second surprise: “I really don’t want to kill you. You’re not my target, Selene, not today. So let me just repeat myself: when I let you go, _leave_.”

“There’ll be a next time,” Selene growls.

“I know,” Charles says.

Erik holds his breath - and then there are footsteps walking away, slowly, heavily, weaving.

“I can’t say that was entirely unexpected,” is the next thing that Charles says. He sounds winded. The words are full of pain and regret and dissatisfaction.

Erik reaches out to him, haltingly. The first question he asks is, “Did you really have backup?”

“Yes, and she really does have a very big gun,” Charles says.

Erik thinks that over. Asks the next, very necessary question. “ _Who are you._ ”

Charles sighs. “I don’t suppose we could discuss that someplace a little bit more private. Someplace I and mine could properly protect you.”

“I’d rather you told me, here and now,” Erik says.

“I understand,” Charles says. “And I’ll tell you the truth. But first I need to sit down.”

Erik opens his mouth, but someone else’s voice asks the question on the tip of his tongue: “Charles, are you all right?”

A woman’s voice. She’s breathing heavily, and she’s carrying something heavy. Erik can hear the clank of metal and machinery against, or inside, a container of some kind.

“I’m fine, Betsy, just a little bloodied up,” Charles says.

Betsy clicks her tongue softly, and Erik can hear her annoyance and concern. “I told you I should have stayed with you.”

“And I also needed someone who could see everything more clearly than I could. Never mind. The danger is past, and we’ll be fine for now.”

“What are we going to do with the dead body?” she asks.

“I don’t honestly know.”

Erik taps around with his cane. He lets out a small sound of dismay when he makes contact with something on the ground. Dead weight, falling out of his arms. “Selene killed one of her own,” he says, involuntarily.

“Something that she’s never had any problems doing,” he hears Betsy say. “As cold-blooded as they come, and the problem with her is, she’s proud of it.”

“You’ve known her for a long time.”

“Not a long time,” Betsy says. “But it feels like it. I’ve lost count of the number of times we’ve had to fight her.”

“Too many,” Charles says, quietly. “And the number of people she’s killed is even higher.”

A cold edge of fear touches Erik’s heart, and he winces, and says, “Someone please answer my questions. I’d like for it to be you, Charles. Who are you,” he asks again, “and what is this all about? What do you want of me? Why were you and Selene talking about recruitment?”

“Charles,” Betsy says, warningly. “We can’t talk about this out here.”

“But I gave Erik my word I’d answer his question. One of them.” There’s a soft grunt, pain and effort mixed together, and then there are footsteps coming closer. “Erik?” 

“Charles,” Erik says.

“I’m Charles Xavier of Section 8, of the Military Intelligence Directorate, Providence. My associate’s name is Betsy Braddock. More than this, I cannot say out here. Please come with us, and we’ll do our best to protect you, and to tell you what you need to know.”

Erik has to swallow hard, and make himself close his mouth. “What does the government want from me?”

But it’s Betsy who answers. “The sooner we can get you to safety, the sooner we can tell you.”

“Please come with us, Erik,” Charles says.


	5. Chapter 5

Charles comes awake with a small start when the lights come on in the compartment. 

Selene’s blood is still on his cuffs; he can see the tiny drops of faded red when he tries to rub the sleep from his eyes. 

“That’s my cue,” Betsy says, quietly, and she slips out into the narrow corridor. 

Charles breathes in, and listens to the clack and clatter and clash of the train.

In the opposite seat, Erik’s shoulder twitches, and then his head comes up. “Where are we? What time is it?”

“Half past six. I don’t know where we are,” Charles admits. “I’m much more familiar with the coast. And with the mountains.”

“You’re not a city person,” Erik observes around a stifled yawn.

“I was raised in the countryside,” Charles agrees. It’s still half-true. He doesn’t want to explain the part where he avoided going back to the house where he had been born.

“Is it safe for me to ask you questions?”

“Yes, after a fashion,” Charles says. There is still a twinge of pain in the knuckles of his left hand, and he shakes it out, carefully. “I’ll do my best to answer.”

“What exactly am I going to be tested on?”

“Hearing ability and acuity. Part of Section 8’s mandate is to keep an ear on all communications taking place within the borders of Providence,” Charles explains. “The popularity of radio, and its ease of use and access, means that there are always new channels and new stations to be listening to.”

“Something like voyeurism, then?” There is amusement lurking around the edges of Erik’s slightly sardonic smile.

Charles shakes his head, and only too late remembers that Erik won’t actually be able to notice the gesture. “I wouldn’t call it that. We’re not talking about standard transmissions of voices or music. We don’t listen to the ham radio operators, we don’t listen to the commercial stations, and we certainly don’t listen to the frequencies allocated to the other branches of the armed forces.” 

“Then what do you listen to?”

Charles sighs, and frowns, and looks away. Looks outside the window, at the countryside as it falls under the dark blanket of night. 

How many people are out there, he wonders. He catches a glimpse of lights coming on, a cluster of houses huddled together, men and women and children who listen to the radio and sing along to familiar tunes, and never think about how the numbers on the band must continue above and below the standard frequencies.

In his head he hears a familiar jittering rhythm, dits and dahs, short and long pulses of sound.

“Morse code,” he says, after a while.

He watches Erik’s eyebrows move towards his hairline. “Really, Charles? Morse code?”

“Or perhaps I should say, encrypted Morse code. It would be quite pointless to compose secret messages in a code that everyone has at the very least heard about.”

“Encrypted,” Erik repeats, and looks thoughtful. There are lines around his mouth and between his eyebrows and in his forehead. “That sounds complicated.”

“I’d hoped to save the lecture for another time,” Charles says, after a moment. “But since you asked. Let’s say you don’t run off on me, and that you pass the tests that will be administered to you. If you decide to stay on, if you decide to help us, then you’ll be listening to Morse code transmissions. That’s it. You’ll wait on them, watch out for stray transmissions, try to figure out if there are any methods to them, any schedules. And you’ll send anything and everything you hear on to the codebreakers. Your task will be that of the receiver - but we’ll rely on you, on your ability to hear things, to detect the transmissions at all.”

There’s a long silence. 

He thinks about the first time he’d ever gotten on this train, on this specific route. He thinks about his younger self, wide-eyed and full of it, proud of getting away from the endless routine of reading and thinking and nitpicking. 

Betsy’s shadow moves across the door, then steps aside.

There’s a knock, and a uniformed porter looks in. He tips his cap to Charles and murmurs, “Dinner will be served in the dining car in ten minutes, sir.”

“Thank you,” Charles says, and when the porter closes the door again he looks expectantly at Erik. “Something to eat?”

“All right,” Erik says after a moment. He gets to his feet, carefully, and reaches for his long cane.

Charles follows him out into the corridor. “Any requests?” he asks, smiling at Betsy.

“Coffee,” she says, shortly. “And whatever passes for a sandwich.”

“I’m pretty sure they have some decent food here; it’s not the first time we’ve been on, after all, and I’ve heard no complaints from the others.”

She grimaces, and shakes her head. “I’ve had some bad reactions to the bread, is all.”

“Then don’t eat it,” Charles tells her. “I’ll try to find something, all right?”

“Good luck.”

“That doesn’t sound too encouraging,” Erik says as he emerges cautiously into the corridor. “Is it really that bad around here?”

“At least we can cook where we’re going,” Betsy says, before stepping into the compartment and closing the door behind her.

“Turn to your left, then walk straight ahead,” Charles tells Erik, helpfully.

“Thank you,” Erik says, and taps his way ahead.

“If we can’t get any good food here,” Charles says as he follows Erik through the door into the next car, “I can cook when we get to our destination. I’ve been told that at least the food I make is edible.”

“I can cook, too,” Erik says. Is he laughing? Charles can’t tell, since Erik’s back is turned to him. “Though it might take me a while to get used to a new kitchen.”

Before Charles can react to that, Erik pushes at the last set of doors, and the dining car opens to them: square tables tucked snugly into tiny alcoves, hugging the walls of the narrow space.

“I’m - going to need some help?” Erik says.

Charles takes his elbow gently, waves off the young woman in the immaculate white dress. “Luckily it’s only about half full,” he says, “we won’t have any problems finding a table.”

“It would be quite a shame if we had to wait to eat,” is Erik’s rejoinder.

Charles chuckles softly, and leads him to the table nearest the bar. Bronze fittings in polished wood, and a man in a trim waistcoat bustling about the coffee and tea services. 

“Good evening,” the young woman says as soon as they’re seated. “Tonight we’re serving roast leg of lamb with white beans and asparagus, unless you’d prefer the mussels in white wine?”

“I’ll have the lamb,” Charles says. “Erik?”

“The mussels for me, please.” He watches as Erik sends a social smile in the direction of the young woman. “And could you please make up a few sandwiches for later?”

“Certainly, sir.” 

Charles watches, mildly fascinated, as Erik pushes his ever-present dark-tinted sunglasses up the bridge of his nose. As he taps his fingertips over the tablecloth in search of his table napkin, which he unfolds carefully onto his lap. He seems to have no problems with his place setting - though Charles does notice that Erik doesn’t turn his wine glass right side up.

“I don’t much like the taste of wine,” Erik explains, as though he were aware of Charles’s scrutiny. “And alcohol does funny things to my sense of coordination. I’m already short one sense; it would be a disaster to impair the rest. I would rather be a teetotaler. But please don’t feel that you have to abstain on my behalf.”

“I prefer gimlets, preferably my own, thank you very much.”

Erik laughs softly to himself.

He has a nice laugh, Charles thinks after a moment: one that makes all the lines in his face appear.

“Hey, you,” someone says, loudly, breaking the quiet buzz of the dining car.

For a split-second, Charles freezes - and then the fear drains out of him and leaves him cold, and makes him reach for the knife on his place setting. 

“Waitress!” The man at the table nearest the doors looks like he’s been drinking for hours if the vivid red tint of his nose is any indication. He waves his empty glass imperiously. “Refill!”

Charles grits his teeth and looks away. This is not the time or the place for trouble. Getting Erik to the Section 8 post is the priority. He would rather accomplish that without anyone noticing them.

“I can hear you, you know,” Erik suddenly says in a low, intense tone. “That voice reminds you of something terrible.”

He blinks. Looks up. Erik’s head is tilted a little to the left. “Excuse me?”

“I can hear that you are clenching your fists.”

Charles starts, and looks at his hands. His napkin is nothing but a mass of creases, now.

Caught, he thinks, and Erik didn’t even have to be able to see him to figure it out. He kind of wants to admire the other man’s ability, and he kind of wants to hide from it. He takes pains to hide his darker feelings from Jean, from Betsy, from the others. Even from Emma Frost. 

In stark contrast, Erik already has his number, and they’ve only known each other for a day.

He forces himself to ignore the other patron, who is even now trying to rile up the young woman.

Erik is now looking more or less in that same direction, and there is a crease between his eyebrows that makes him look like he’s paying attention - which, Charles suddenly realizes, probably means that he is. 

He leans across the table, and whispers, “What are you planning?”

“Planning?” Erik is whispering, too. “Nothing yet. Maybe I’ll have an idea later.”

Surprise. Relief. Charles blinks, and then he has to repress an urge to laugh and thus give the game away. “How much,” he says, very slowly, the words tinged with a respectful disbelief around the edges, “have you gotten away with?”

Erik just straightens up in his seat and taps a fingertip primly on the table. “I’ll never tell.”

The sottish man abruptly falls asleep: rattling snores. 

“He’s nowhere near in good shape,” Erik observes. “Good.”

Charles is saved from the possibility of hysterics by the return of the young woman: she pushes a cart up to them, and smiles, just a little pinched around the edges, as she presents them with their food. “They’re still making the sandwiches back in the kitchen,” she tells Erik as she takes the silver dome off his plate. “I’ll get them to you with your coffee, if you’re having any later.”

“Thank you,” Erik says.

Companionable clink of cutlery on plates, the measured rise and fall of conversation. 

“Coffee?” Charles asks, at the end of the meal.

“Please,” Erik says. He mops up his plate with a piece of crusty bread. He eats with small, precise movements, and he seems to be fastidious with his hands: Charles has already lost track of the number of times that Erik has tried to wipe his fingertips on his napkin.

Charles waves at the young woman, who hurries over, and nods when he asks for a pot of coffee.

“Tell me a little about yourself, if you don’t mind,” Erik asks, suddenly, after he pushes his plate to the side.

“Me?” Charles asks. “What do you want to know?”

“What is it that you do, exactly? I know you can fight. And you sounded like you’d been through the wars and back, when you were, ah, _dealing_ with Selene. You can’t tell me you’re just someone who stays in one place all the time and listens to Morse code.”

Charles blinks, and squints at Erik’s impassively curious face.

Evade the question? Tell the truth? What part of the truth?

“You are...perceptive,” he tells Erik, after a moment.

“I should hope that I am, if only in order to survive,” is the reply, half a riposte and half a rebuke, though Erik is still smiling. A sliver of sharp humor.

“We could use quite a bit of that,” Charles says. He grimaces, thinks of the recent problems at Section 8. Seven stations gone in one week, lost to the people who are supposed to be listening to them, and he doesn’t know how to feel about Emma Frost’s paranoid assumption that there might be a mole in the ranks, that someone in the group has already been suborned or is being coerced into helping their enemies. Either way, a disaster for both intelligence and counterintelligence. “A little more perspicacity, and a lot more common sense. Honestly, some days I feel like I’m just laboring under the delusion that everyone else I’m working with is supposed to be intelligent.”

“I’m inclined to agree with the _delusion_ part,” Erik says, mildly. “And you’re stalling.”

Charles sighs, and shoots an unamused look across the table. “Only because I’m not sure I should be talking about Selene and her ilk when I’ve just finished a nice dinner. You’re putting me off my digestion.”

“Sorry.” Erik doesn’t sound sorry at all.

Charles can’t help but shake his head, and smile.

///

“You _what_ ,” Erik says, for what must have been the third or fourth time. “The more I hear of these exploits of yours, the more I feel that you must be playing a very elaborate joke on me. Or at least I want to think that that’s true, because the alternative is too much to bear.”

“What’s the alternative?” Betsy is grinning and her coffee cup is still suspended in mid-motion, from the small table in the compartment to her mouth.

“Don’t encourage him,” Charles sighs. He can feel the tips of his ears - they’re radiating the same heat that he can almost see in his face, if he glances into the warped and trembling glass of the window.

It’s drawing on to midnight, and he thinks that they’re not that far away from their stop.

But Erik is speaking again, and that oddly sonorous voice pulls Charles back to the conversation: “The alternative,” Erik says, “is that I take everything Charles has said as true, which means that he is either a fool or very lucky or he actually is as good as he claims to be.”

“Here, now,” Charles says, grinning in spite of himself, “I haven’t gone around making any claims. You asked me to tell you what I do, and I’ve done nothing more than that. I don’t embellish my stories. They don’t need it.”

Betsy almost laughs herself into a coughing fit, and Erik looks amused when he extracts a battered handkerchief from his jacket pocket and waves it in her direction. “You’re right about a few things, Erik,” she says after she’s recovered.

“Which are?” Erik asks.

“You’re right about everything. Charles is a fool, and he is lucky.” Suddenly she looks very sober indeed. “And he is also very good.”

That wipes the smile from Erik’s face at last. “That I already knew.” 

Charles watches him take a deep breath. Watches him drum the fingertips of his right hand against his knee. The question comes out as of its own accord: “You still want to play, don’t you?”

Erik starts, but only a little. “I think you know the answer to that.”

“I only know what happened to you,” Charles says quietly. “The rest you’ll have to tell me.”

A long silence, during which even Betsy fidgets, twirling a strand of hair between two fingers.

Then Erik sighs, and says, “Do you know that I was working, when you came to recruit me? I was tuning a piano, a beautiful old grand piano, the most beautiful thing in a house that sounds like shadows and neglect. A shame to have to cover everything else up for what I’ve learned was quite a long time. 

“The piano belonged to one of my clients. Or I suppose I must now call Worthington a friend. I was to put the piano back in working order, so that when his mother remarries and comes back to that house she would have the music that she likes, the music that would make her happy.

“I didn’t take the job for the money, though I did need funds. I didn’t take the job because Worthington asked it of me. I took the job, took the money, all for the sake of being able to touch a piano that powerful once again. I was making music again when I was supposed to be focused on the working parts, on the strings and on the keys.”

Charles watches him reach into his satchel. Careful fingers curved around a battered notebook and a wooden-handled awl, both familiar objects by now. 

“Do you know what I use this awl for? It isn’t a weapon, Charles. It never was intended to be one. I use it for a writing instrument. I use it to compose. I’ve been living surrounded by music for all my life. I lost it, for a while, when I lost my sight. And now I have it again, if only in flashes, for a few brief hours. I was writing music again, at night when I couldn’t sleep, when the voices of my neighbors wouldn’t stop going on and on. I had music, and I was alive, and I had a few friends, and it was enough.”

“Erik,” Charles says, and he thinks the look on his face mirrors the surprise and sympathy on Betsy’s.

“And now there’s something else, something bigger. So you tell me. Assuming I even pass whatever examinations your Section 8 might have.” Erik’s expression doesn’t change; he still sounds calm. His fingers are still tapping out that rhythm. “I think I want to do something, Charles; I think I want to help you, or help my country. But let me be frank with you, as well - I also want my music. I want to keep the part of myself that I thought I had lost, that I have found once again.”

“Where on Earth,” Betsy murmurs, after a while, sounding determined. 

“Betsy,” Charles says, mildly. 

“Where on Earth are we going to find a piano, and what are we going to tell Emma Frost?”

He nods at Erik, though Erik can’t see him. “We tell her what Erik said. If he gets into the program.”

“Were I a betting person, Charles,” she says, “I’d put everything I had on Erik getting in.”

“I’d take your bet,” Erik tells her, “if only I weren’t the subject of it.”

Betsy snickers. “You can cook me a decent dinner, or something. Charles tells me you can cook. Anything has to be better than what he makes - I mean, he cooks, it’s not _bad_ , but he’s kind of a one-trick pony, you know?”

Erik begins to chuckle, a soft dry sound.

“I should shoot you for insubordination,” Charles says, grinning at Betsy.

Her snickers turn into full-blown laughter, genuinely amused. “Do that, and Jean’ll have your hide.”


	6. Chapter 6

The long, mournful call of the departing train fades into the energetic clatter and crash of its wheels grinding into motion - and soon that, too, is gone. In its place is a coughing roar, discordant, the sounds of several truck engines turning over and sputtering into life. The sharp pungent fumes of diesel.

There’s a sharp banging sound, and warmth all along Erik’s side, and then Charles’s voice calling, “Back to barracks, please.”

Too many echoes. Too many sensations. Erik tilts his head this way and that, and hangs on to his seat and to his things, trying to make sense of it all. The mutter and grind of crates brushing up against one another. The rattle and groan of the workings of the truck he’s currently riding. 

Another voice in the truck, half-shouting over the crash of movement: “Borrow a light, sir?”

Erik is about to say “No” when Charles calls back, “Here!”

Tell-tale sulfur, sharp and not unwelcome. 

He gropes blindly for Charles’s shoulder. “You smoke?”

“No,” is Charles’s reply, a little too close to his ear, but at the very least easy to understand. “But I’ve found that matches are quite useful things to be carrying around. You?”

“I used to,” Erik admits. “I quit.”

Over and above all the noises around him and hammering at him, though, Erik can hear a faint and gentle whisper. A brushing cacophony, the constant murmur of leaves against leaves. Wind in trees, almost familiar, and completely new at the same time. He can’t not hear it. “Where are we?” he calls to no one in particular. “And where are we going?”

Again, it’s Charles who answers. Erik has no idea where Betsy has gone, unless she’s driving, or she’s in one of the other trucks. “Into the mountains.” He doesn’t explain any further.

Well, that explains the scoured-clean quality of the air, fuel-laden fumes notwithstanding. That explains why he can smell flowers, grass, sun-warmed rock - sharp and sweet and, to someone like him who’s been in too many cities, strange. 

In his mind’s eye he imagines the rolling hills that he’d glimpsed a scant few times, traveling to visit distant family, the society of children he saw just once or twice a year. Slopes covered in a thousand lush greens. 

He’s bounced about and jolted till he has to grit his teeth and lock his jaw, for fear of biting his tongue off. A long, winding road, and still the wind blows, and at some point he buttons his coat all the way up to the collar.

“I promise we’re heading someplace warm,” Charles half-shouts in his ear at some point. “I’ll make sure you’re seated near one of the fireplaces.”

“Please,” Erik forces out, through his shivering. “I’ll be no good to you if I catch my death of cold.”

“And after all the trouble I went to just to get you here in the first place.” 

They stop and Erik starts at the sounds of barking dogs, of sharp whistles.

“Just an inspection, they’re checking to make sure it’s really us,” Charles tells him. “And this means we’re almost there.”

“I don’t even know where _there_ is,” Erik complains.

Charles sounds rueful when he replies, after the trucks have resumed their journey. “I’m truly sorry, Erik. Operational security, you see - I wouldn’t even be allowed to tell you the name of this place until Section 8 has decided that you’ll be working with us.”

“A fat lot of good a name would do me or you or anyone else. I can’t see anything, remember?”

“But you can describe the trip, and I know you’ve been listening to everything very intently.”

Erik raises an eyebrow. “Are you really that worried about people finding out where this place is?”

“Yes.”

Before he can make any sense of Charles, the truck bounces to a halt, and this time he can hear it and feel it when the engines are throttled all the way down into silence.

“Last stop,” the same voice that had asked Charles for a light calls. “Everyone get off here.”

“Thank goodness,” Charles says, and his presence is gone from Erik’s side.

Erik wobbles unsteadily on his feet as he’s helped out of the truck. It’s a wonder he doesn’t simply collapse into an undignified heap next to what he assumes are Charles’s shoes. 

There are many voices all around now, some calling a welcome and others shouting for help.

Erik focuses on the footsteps walking towards them, on the familiar voice speaking to Charles: “I never like traveling away from this place,” Betsy says, “because getting back here - it’s hell on the nerves, really.”

“Let’s hope there’s good news waiting for us, at least,” is Charles’s reply. “Off with you to our desks. Check in with Sean. I’ll try to follow.”

“You’re not coming with?”

“I have to stay with Erik,” Charles says. 

“Sorry,” Erik says, automatically.

“No, no, please don’t do that, no need to apologize,” Charles tells him.

“Good luck, Erik,” Betsy says. She touches his hand, and he takes it in a firm grip. 

“I hope to join you shortly,” he tells her, and then her footsteps recede from him.

He turns back in Charles’s direction. “Where to now?”

“I’m glad you asked,” Charles says. “Let’s get out of this wind, shall we?”

He lets Charles take his arm, and lets Charles lead him into a place of oddly hollowed-out echoes. Their footsteps ring loudly - concrete, he thinks, entire spaces made out of concrete.

“Staircase,” Charles says. “Down five steps, on my count - _now_.”

Erik steps carefully with him. A door bangs open ahead of them, and they follow the echoes of that sound into a room full of the smell of oil and of polish. He wrinkles his nose, shakes his head. Movement brushing past him, men talking and lighting cigarettes.

From one cavernous space to another - he wishes he could see, or at least stare, because the sounds he hears are both so uniform and so strange. 

Slowly the echoes become more and more muffled. The floor beneath their feet keeps sloping downward. He smells earth and damp and - “Charles, are we _underground_?”

That gets him a mildly surprised chuckle. “For now, yes.”

Even Charles’s voice has taken on a slightly spectral sound.

Erik fights off a convulsive shudder.

The sound of another door being opened. The crackle and hiss of several fires. Erik aches all over, and when Charles stops so does he, and he sways with fatigue and confusion.

“Here’s a chair, sit down,” Charles says, and Erik does so with a sigh of relief. 

He holds his hands out to the nearest source of warmth that he can hear - but there’s a table in the way, and he’s temporarily sidetracked by it, and by the things on top of it. A box with a grille on one of the broad faces, and below the grille is a series of knobs. His fingers encounter a phone connector plugged into the instrument; he follows the trailing cable until he finds the headphones.

Before he can ask Charles questions about the radio set, he can hear other sets of footsteps shuffling into the room, and he can hear other chairs creaking as they’re occupied. 

“Ladies and gentlemen,” a woman’s voice says from the front of the room. “Thank you for coming here. We are about to commence testing. Section 8 personnel, please step away from the tables and chairs.”

“Charles,” Erik says. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

“I’m staying here to help you,” Charles says. “May I take your hand?”

“Yes.”

Charles guides his fingertips back to the box. “Here’s the power switch for the radio set. Here is the volume knob, and here is the frequency knob.” Charles helps him to touch each controller in turn.

“Let’s begin,” the woman says. “First, please put on the provided headphones.”

Erik frowns and does as he’s told. The echoes in the room change. Some sounds are amplified, and some are muffled. He can hear the man sitting at the table behind him muttering: “What nonsense is this, honestly, what do they want me to do?”

“On my signal,” the woman says, “please turn your radios on. Then please find the following frequency.” She reads off a series of numbers.

He reaches out for Charles, wordlessly.

“I’m right here, Erik,” is the reassuring answer. “Wait for her signal to turn the radio on.”

“Go,” the woman says.

Erik hits the power switch, and his ears fill up with hissing static, and the ghostly echoes of voices and not-quite-audible words.

“Switch to the indicated frequency, please.”

Charles radiates warmth over Erik’s shoulder. He puts his fingers on Erik’s on the frequency tuner. 

“Left,” Charles says, helpfully, and Erik starts turning the knob, a little at a time.

“What am I listening for?”

It’s not Charles who answers him. “When you get to the indicated frequency, you will hear a signal consisting of three short sounds, then three long sounds, then three more short sounds. Stop when you hear it, and wait for further instructions.”

“Almost there,” Charles says. “Listen, Erik.”

Erik catches the indicated signal, faintly at first - so he makes a few more adjustments to the tuner until he can hear the message clearly. 

Three short sounds. S.

Three long sounds. O.

Three short sounds. S.

He knows nothing else about Morse code.

To Erik’s ears, the message repeats four times - and then it’s overwhelmed by a burst of noise, a blast of conversations - it’s as if he’s been dropped into a crowd, into the busy intersection that he’d crossed just a few days ago, when he’d encountered Selene and then Charles.

He listens. He can’t help but listen. A voice that sounds like Angel’s is alternately humming and singing in broken phrases, as though she only remembers half the words to her song. Three men argue about the day’s racing odds. A cluster of children hurry past, laughing, and they are followed by a man’s voice telling them to keep holding on to each other’s hands. There’s a whirring sound, like wheels turning quickly, followed by a woman’s voice.

Erik smiles when he hears her.

The brief moment of silence is broken by more chatter, more loud noises, and once the long loud blare of a car horn being pressed and held, and then the radio falls silent, and he takes his headphones off.

Still in front, the woman conducting the test asks, “What did the driver of the car say?”

“All I heard was the bloody horn,” the man behind Erik says, sounding irritated.

Erik blinks. If he thinks of the entire test as a piece of music, mostly vocal in nature, then it becomes that much easier to consider the elements, the various sounds and exclamations, separately and then as a whole.

So he says, just loud enough for Charles and the woman to hear, “The driver said, _Get out of my way!_ ”

After a pause, the woman says, “Mister Xavier, please escort your companion on to the next room. The rest of you, thank you very much for coming. Transportation will be provided so that you may safely return to your homes.”

The last thing Erik hears is the man who had been sitting behind him, incredulous: “But all I heard was the horn! How the hell could the blind man have heard that - he must have made it up!”

///

Charles can’t help but smile to himself as he opens the door in the back of the first testing room, as he ushers Erik through. 

He remembers thinking that they could really put someone like Erik to good use around here, and he thinks about how perceptive Erik is, how he really relies on his ears, and he thinks that Erik might just be able to save a lot of lives.

“Where to now?” Erik asks, after a moment.

Charles guides him into a slightly smaller room, at least when compared to the first one they’d been in. Two tables placed at least twenty feet apart. The setup on each table is identical: a radio set up as a receiver, as in the previous room. The difference is the telegraph key next to the paper tape feeder, such that the key both generates audible signals and records those same signals on the paper tape. 

“Here,” Charles says when they get to the far end. This table is set up right next to a radiator. He smiles, tightly, when Erik sinks into the chair and puts his hands out to the heat source, and sighs quietly. “Better?”

“A little,” Erik says. “Though I don’t know how long I’m going to stay here, and I don’t know what you want me to do now that I’ve gotten past one test.”

“What we need to do next is a little bit more difficult,” Charles admits after a moment. He snags a three-legged stool from one of the corners and sits down in it, next to the table, so he can lean on one elbow and observe the expressions crossing Erik’s face. “Everyone is familiar with S.O.S., but not everyone knows Morse code, even if they’ve heard of it.”

“You want me to learn Morse code,” Erik says.

“And I’m afraid that I’ll need you to learn it in a hurry.” Charles sighs softly. “Now that you’re here in Section 8, and now that you’ve made it this far, I can start telling you the story of this place. And it’s a bad one right now. We keep Providence safe by listening in to her enemies’ plans and moving preemptively against them, if we can. But we cannot move against those enemies if we’re not listening to them. Just before I left to get you, we’d already lost seven enemy stations. Seven enemy transmitters. We suspect that they’ve been switching frequencies so as to decrease the chances of being found.”

“Losing enemy stations - that seems careless.”

“It is. I won’t mince words and I won’t hide that from you. It’s a failure of intelligence, is what it is.” Charles runs his hands through his hair, bangs his fist on the table, once. “I’m counting on the fact that I think you might have excellent ears.”

“You are asking me to do something heroic when I don’t even know Morse code yet,” Erik says, and his expressions range from curious to daunted to determined. 

“I am,” Charles says. “And you still have the choice that we gave you to start with. If at any point you want to quit, you want to leave, you want out - we’ll get you out of here. Someone will be along to protect you. We try our very best to make sure our people are safe; for now, that group includes you.”

He glances at Erik, and doesn’t deny that he feels anxious. He has no idea where they can even begin to find someone who might be better at listening for enemy signal stations. 

Fleetingly, he wonders about Janos Quested and whether Jean has managed to locate him. He hopes he’s safe and back with Moira’s team, and he hopes she’s on her way back.

When he turns his attention back to Erik, the man is smiling to himself, and he’s tapping out a familiar sequence on the edge of the table. 

Charles’s training makes him hear the sequence as _dit-dit-dit-dah _, and he raises his eyebrows at Erik. “I know what that is, and I know it sounds like music to you, but it means something different to me.”__

__“Of course I know what it is,” Erik tells him. “The opening phrase of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C minor. At some point I thought that I would like to play it on the piano - that I’d create my own arrangement.”_ _

__Charles stares at him for a moment, admiringly - just for a moment, before the urgency of the moment reasserts itself. “It’s also the letter V in Morse code,” he tells Erik, and watches as the other man’s eyebrow jumps upwards, briefly. “You don’t believe me?”_ _

__“It’s not that I don’t believe you - I’m just wondering if it was some kind of coincidence. Five, the Roman numeral V, and _V_ in Morse code.” Erik holds up his right hand in a V-sign. “It occurs to me, once again, that we live in a strange and capricious world.”_ _

__“That’s a good word for the situation, Mister Lehnsherr,” says a new voice. “Capricious. It does seem quite apt.”_ _

__Charles is about to get to his feet when Emma Frost flicks her fingers in his direction, so he stays seated. “Ma’am,” he says. It’s not how he would normally address her, but these are hardly normal circumstances._ _

__Erik is on his feet, hand held out before him. “Hello? You have the advantage of me, madam. You know my name, while I don’t know yours.”_ _

__“I am Emma Frost,” she says, and the effect is simultaneously surprising and amusing to watch._ _

__Erik’s eyebrows draw down into a straight line. His face works, and his mouth moves, shaping her name. “Capricious indeed. I know you,” he says at last, surprising Charles. “You - you were looking into my case. Into what happened to me.”_ _

__“I was investigating Sebastian Shaw, yes,” she says, cool and calm and imperious. “And to tell you the truth, I still am. Only the reasons change.”_ _

__Charles watches as she takes Erik’s hand._ _

__He’s familiar with her hands, with the strong grip, with the old traces of terrible injuries._ _

__The stories are part and parcel of Section 8, now - that she wrote the memo asking for the formation of the group with hands that were still partly splinted together, aggravating some of the grievous fractures that had been inflicted upon her. That she had sustained those injuries - and a few more that a few of the old hands only talk about in whispers - under intense interrogation. That she’d never broken under the weight of weeks of torture - that she’d spent the time patiently waiting for her captors to let slip the information that she needed to take back to Providence._ _

__He’s seen photographs of the aftermath of her escape. It’s hard to fake the corpses, the shocked expressions of men who met their deaths completely unprepared._ _

__And it’s hard to fake the intelligence that she’d brought back._ _

__Emma Frost has a title, of sorts, within the agency, and it’s a title no one will call her to her face, though it’s never said without respect and, Charles admits, a little bit of awe._ _

__So it’s surprising when Erik, of all people, says that title out loud. “They were whispering about you,” he tells her now, and Charles leans in despite himself. “The people who were trying to find out what happened to me. They had a name for you, a title. They called you _Snedronningen_ , the Snow Queen.”_ _

__“You listened to them,” she says, nodding minutely to herself._ _

__“I had little else to do, because I could not see, and because I was not used to being unable to see.”_ _

__“Quite. Please, sit down.”_ _

__Charles hastily vacates his stool, then, and Emma Frost murmurs thanks as she sits down. He goes to stand behind Erik._ _

__“I wish I could say, Mister Lehnsherr,” Emma Frost says, “that it was good to see you again. But under the current circumstances I’d say that that would be in rather bad taste.”_ _

__Erik shrugs. “I’m given to understand that you might need me.”_ _

__“We might need your ears, yes, and that fine mind of yours. Charles will have told you something of our situation by now; what do you make of it?”_ _

__“Even if I said I’d help you,” Erik says, “you can’t possibly think I can contribute that much.”_ _

__“On the contrary, I think you’re more valuable than you perceive yourself to be.”_ _

__“You don’t know what I can do - and you can’t know, because I don’t know anything about it myself.”_ _

__“So this is your chance to find out,” Emma Frost says, without missing a beat. She doesn’t raise her voice, and she remains icy and calm. “You were going to be a musical prodigy; now we’ll find out if you might be a different kind of prodigy entirely.”_ _

__Erik is silent for a moment. His hands are folded together on the table. As it happens, he’s within inches of the telegraph key._ _

__Charles thinks of him working the telegraph and wonders what kind of fist Erik will have, once he’s been trained._ _

__For some reason, the mental image sends him back to thinking about Erik’s fingers tapping out music: he thinks of grace and purpose when he thinks of Erik’s hands, and he wants to touch those fingertips, to feel those knuckles._ _

__“How much time do I have to learn?” Erik asks, eventually._ _

__“I can give you three weeks,” Emma Frost says, “no more, I’m afraid.”_ _

__Charles butts in, then. “Surely you could give him more time.”_ _

__“There is no more time, Charles, and you know that as well as I do. We have already lost another three stations. If we cannot get them back, the consequences for Providence might as well be unthinkable.” She shifts so that she can steeple her fingers beneath her chin. “Ten missing stations, Charles, including half of what we’ve managed to link to codename ‘Hornet’. We are literally sitting ducks right now - ”_ _

__“Codename ‘Hornet’?” Erik asks._ _

__“Someone placed very high up in the destabilization movement that is working out of Genosha,” Emma Frost explains. “We suspect that this person is _of_ Genosha itself - their government sanctions these activities, at the very least, if they are not actively funding them. We hold Hornet responsible for at least two major instances of terrorism in Providence. The marketplace bombing from three years ago, and the train derailment before that. It is imperative that we monitor this person’s activities. We need to know what he or she or they are planning.” _ _

__Charles catches her eye. Lifts his eyebrows._ _

__They both know who Hornet is, and they both know Erik’s connection to that same Hornet._ _

__She shakes her head, minutely._ _

__Charles is suddenly and selfishly grateful that Erik can’t see. That he can’t pick up on these cues._ _

__Emma Frost’s reasons are her own, and for right now, those reasons are the law that Charles must abide by._ _

__He won’t tell Erik that Sebastian Shaw and Hornet are one and the same. Not now. Not yet._ _

__There’s a small, satisfied smirk on her lips when she turns back to Erik. “I will ask you, then, Mister Lehnsherr - will you work with us? Will you join Section 8, and serve your country?”_ _

__“Three weeks to become fluent in Morse code,” Erik says. “My country asks quite a lot of me.”_ _

__“Not without reason, wouldn’t you say?”_ _

__Erik bows his head._ _

__Charles finds himself holding his breath, waiting for Erik to decide._ _

__He watches Erik breathe. In. Out. Deep and rhythmic and steady._ _

__“Charles,” Erik says, unexpectedly._ _

__“Erik,” Charles replies. He braces his feet. He can predict what might come next, but he doesn’t know which scenario might actually take place until Erik continues._ _

__“You really need someone like me to do this?”_ _

__Charles shakes his head. “No, Erik, we don’t need someone like you. We need someone who can hear what others can’t. Who can perceive what others might never notice. We need _you_ , specifically. Not anyone else.”_ _

__Erik looks up, and his sightless eyes find Charles somehow. “All right. I’ll do it.”_ _

__Charles would sag with relief if only Emma Frost weren’t there._ _

__As for the woman herself, she merely nods and gets to her feet, and says, “Good hunting, gentlemen.” The door behind Charles creaks and groans as she pulls it open and sweeps out._ _

__“We’ve got a lot of work to do,” Charles says, at last, when he thinks he can trust his voice again._ _

__“When do we start?” Erik asks._ _

__Charles allows himself a small smile. “Right now.”_ _


	7. Chapter 7

“I’m telling you, Charles,” Jean says as she continues to work the cricks out of her neck and shoulders, “there’s something wrong with that particular rifle you want me and Betsy to start using.”

“What is wrong with it, exactly?” Charles asks, and struggles to keep the trembling umbrella steady. He can see the wind as it sweeps the rain along the entire length of the open-air passage between the Section 8 shooting range and the living quarters. 

His hair and his shoes are soaked, and there’s nothing he can do about these minor inconveniences until he can get back to his own quarters.

Jean doesn’t seem to mind the rain at all, though sodden strands of her hair cling to her streaming cheeks. “I don’t know how to say it,” she says. “The balance is off. The entire mechanism makes far too much noise. Not something you’d want in a stealth situation, such as if you’ve got us playing sniper. Who’d we get it from? That gun’s no good at all. I want to go back to the usual.” 

“Howlett sent it on to us as a prototype, you remember.” He’s grateful when they gain the scant safety of the nearest block of buildings. Night is falling fast. “And I think that you should give the gun another chance. No reports of problems or misfires yet from Meggan’s team or from Jean-Paul’s, and you know how picky _he_ is with weapons.”

“Well, make him use it if he likes it. I don’t,” Jean grumbles. “I want my original rifle back.”

After another dash through the rain, Charles stops at the building marked with the number 4. “You should take the umbrella and go on from here; I’ve got to check in with Erik.”

She’s looking up at the windows when he glances at her - and another look shows that she’s frowning. “Are you sure you’re in the right place for that? There aren’t any lights on in Erik’s window.”

“He could hardly need them.”

“But I know he turns them on when he’s in, mostly because he knows we come visiting,” she points out. “And right now, the lights are turned off.”

Charles clicks his tongue in annoyance. “All right, then, if he’s not here, where could he be?”

“He isn’t going to be leaving this place, and he’s not quite used to getting around on his own yet. There’s only one place he’s really been to over and over again.”

“What could he still be doing in the telegraphy quarters?” Charles asks, half-incredulous.

“You’re really asking a question like that, when you’ve told him that he’s on a deadline?” Jean shakes her head, looking skeptical. 

“No one asked him to spend every damn hour studying.”

“He’s doing that anyway.”

He can’t throw up his hands because if he does he’ll get soaked even further; instead, he saves his breath, keeps pace with Jean. The two of them jog briskly past the living quarters and on towards the series of low, squat buildings that form the heart of this Section 8 post.

Somewhere a clock chimes seven times. The corridors are empty, and they have to turn the lights on as they go, and they don’t encounter another living soul until they make their way down the last series of steeply sloping ramps. Into the very heart of this listening post, into its very quietest places.

For some reason, Charles’s heart gives a sudden lurch - is it of concern? Is it of fear? But what on earth is he afraid of? - when they find the only room in use. An outline of light that escapes the edges of the door, faint beacon in the dark corridor.

Charles opens the door for Jean, into a shroud of semi-darkness that is only relieved by the low glow of an amber-hued bulb.

“Oh, hello. I wasn’t expecting anyone to come here,” says the silver-haired man sitting front to back in this room’s only chair. The dark tones of his skin blend into the shadows of the room. “Something the matter?” 

Charles watches the man light a cigarette and take a battered and chewed stub of pencil from his shirt pocket. There’s a newspaper folded into quarters on the narrow table. The crossword on the uppermost page is already half completed. 

“I can’t even hear myself think in here,” Jean whispers. “How do you stand it, Jericho?”

“I’m more than used to this place,” is the easy answer. “That is, if we’re only talking about this particular room.” Jericho gestures to the other door, marked with a piece of paper that says _Quiet_. “Now, in there’s a different matter entirely. I don’t mind going in there at all, but don’t make me go in there _and then_ close the door. I’d go mad.”

Charles allows himself a tight smile. He knows what he’ll see if he opens the door that Jericho pointed to: four walls covered floor to ceiling in special foam tiles. Acoustic damping. A wooden ceiling carved in a pattern of parallel grooves, in a seemingly random pattern of widths and depths.

He also know what it feels like to be in there, where he’ll hear the thud and beat of his heart, and the rasp of his breathing, and the whir of the thoughts in his mind.

Just that. Nothing more.

“How long,” Charles asks, “how long has he been in there?”

The first response to that is a shrug. “I was going to do some maintenance, you know, check on some of the broken tiles in one of the corners, when he came in here and asked me if he could use the room for an hour or so. But now that I look at my watch, that was two or three hours ago.”

“You didn’t stop him or tell him to leave?”

“He looked comfortable,” Jericho says. “So I got comfortable, too. Right here. Gives me time to finish this thing,” and he rustles his folded newspaper. “I’m a good chunk of the way done, too. It’s been a while since that happened. This is a busy place.”

“It is at that. Well, at least you’re warm and dry out here,” Jean murmurs. “Should I go and get you some food, something to drink - ?”

“If you’re planning to roust him out, I’ll leave with you, see what’s cooking tonight.”

Charles sighs. “I hope he comes along quietly,” he says, mostly to himself, and then he opens the other door.

It’s a little brighter in here, though the light is somewhat wasted on the man sitting at the room’s only table.

Erik looks strange with both his sunglasses and the oversized headphones on. The pattern of deep creases in his face looks more familiar: lines of concentration. His mouth in a grave and determined line.

Charles stares at him as he works his telegraph key.

Lengths of paper tape are scattered about Erik’s feet. He picks one up, and steps more firmly, in order to alert Erik to his presence - though the room itself muffles the sound of his footfall. 

“Erik,” Charles says.

Erik holds up his free hand. Three fingers upright. 

As Charles waits for the requested three minutes to run out, he peers at the strip of paper that he picked up. A seemingly random arrangement of dots and dashes, but there’s something vaguely familiar about the message - and with a start he realizes he’s looking at plaintext: at the Morse code standard words. 

_PARISCODEXCODEXCODEXPARISCODEXPARISPARIS_

“End test,” Erik whispers.

Charles nods as he recognizes the movement of Erik’s arm and elbow - he’s spelling out those two words in dots and dashes.

Erik smiles, a brief flash, and then adds one more character at the end: two dashes.

Then he takes off his headphones, pushes his chair away from the table, and folds his hands neatly in his lap. “Hello, Charles,” he says, the usual rich tones of his voice damped by the room. “Are you the search and rescue party?”

“That would be me and Jean, yes,” Charles says. “You do realize it’s getting quite late?”

“Is it? I hadn’t noticed. Too busy,” and Erik taps his left ear before pushing his sunglasses up the bridge of his nose. “I think I’ve almost got it, you know. I was pushing to see how fast I could get.”

“What’s your current speed?” Charles asks, interest seeping through his concern for a moment.

“Almost 42 words per minute.”

Charles rocks back, just a little, on his heels. “Already?”

Erik’s smile reappears, broadens. “Surprised? But I’ve been in a hurry, just as you specified.” 

“There’s still more than a week left - ”

“Then I can keep improving.” Erik gropes for his cane, and pulls himself to his feet with a grunt of exertion. “My knees do not quite like me right now. To say nothing of my backside.”

“Would you like some help moving around?” Charles makes to step to his side.

“It will do me good to move on my own - that will dispel the stiffness,” Erik says. 

Charles watches him gather his things - the jacket next to the radio set, the satchel hanging from the back of the chair - and gets out of the way as Erik scuffs his shoe, and frowns. “I forget that I can’t really get in or out easily,” he complains. “There aren’t enough echoes for me to find the door.”

“Could you follow my voice?” Charles offers.

“That will do, thank you,” Erik says.

“Come on, then. Jean’s waiting for us. And we can send Jericho off to the mess hall.”

Erik huffs, a sound that could almost be laughter, and follows him out. “Jericho,” he says. “I’m sorry to have kept you here for so long.”

“You were working, so I had time to answer my crossword puzzle,” Jericho says. “No need for you to apologize to me.”

“Did you finish it?”

“Not quite yet. I’ll ask you for help maybe tomorrow, all right?”

“Tomorrow?” Charles asks. He can hear Jean echoing him; she sounds incredulous. “You’re not coming back here tomorrow; you’re resting tomorrow.” In the amber light he peers at the sallowness of Erik’s skin, at his faltering steps. “You’ve more than exceeded every expectation we had of you. Now we’re going to make sure you don’t kill yourself trying to become an expert. You already are one.”

He can hear a growing vehemence in his own voice and he doesn’t think about it, doesn’t want to focus on it or where it might be coming from.

He doesn’t even want to think about Erik hearing that vehemence from him.

He already has to deal with Jericho’s eyebrows, which are creeping steadily towards his hairline.

Charles steps out, and Jean is only half a step behind him, and Erik waits until they’re all out in the corridor to speak again. “Am I an expert?” he asks, looking mildly amused. “How will you know that for sure, unless you put me on actual listening duty?”

“That’ll be up to Miss Frost, I think,” Jericho says. 

“Well, then, when can I speak with her?”

“Not tonight,” Jean says. “There’s no way of knowing if she’s even here.”

When she looks in his direction, Charles shakes his head. “I have no idea,” he says. “I take my orders directly from her, but I haven’t gotten anything new yet.”

“So, rest,” she says to Erik. 

He shakes his head, and looks like he’d like to protest - and then he stops and clutches his side as they ascend the ramps to get back to ground level.

“Erik,” Jean says, and she immediately wedges herself underneath his left arm.

Charles steps toward him as well, a little more cautious, but no less worried. “Will you need my help, as well?”

“I just felt light-headed all of a sudden,” Erik says, shaking his head slowly. “The last time I felt like that was - after the accident.”

“You’re hungry and you’re tired,” Jericho says. “They’re telling you to rest, and I suggest you take their advice, or it’ll be much worse than just a light head next time.”

“Has this happened to anyone in the section before?”

“Yes,” Charles says, and Jean and Jericho are just a beat behind him. 

“Sometimes the new operators push themselves to the very limits of their endurance just to show that they can keep up with the others. Which is an admirable effort, and understandable, but completely unnecessary,” Jean explains.

“I intend to see that such a thing does not happen to you,” Charles adds after a moment.

“All right,” Erik says, at last. “I won’t work tomorrow. I’ll have to find something else to do.”

///

It’s the silence that wakes Erik up the next morning.

It’s the knock on the door that makes him throw off the blankets and make his slow, fumbling round of the room: the clothes that he dropped at the foot of his bed, the sunglasses perched on the very edge of his nightstand, the cane that is not in its usual place next to the bed. He only finds the latter, which has been thrown on top of his sheets, because its loop has gotten snagged on his belt buckle. He’s lucky he didn’t break it in his tossing and turning.

He’s been here a week, he thinks, perhaps not even that. He really needs to learn this room.

It’s just that with his intense focus on the work he’s been doing, he’s rarely spent any time familiarizing himself with the living quarters, much less the rest of the post.

When he opens the door, there’s a soft sound, distinctly amused. 

At least he can recognize that voice.

“What did I get wrong, Charles,” he says as he returns to his bed.

Another muffled sound. This time it’s more clearly a stifled chuckle. Charles clears his throat afterwards. “Your buttons are all done up haphazardly.”

Erik sighs, shakes his head, shuffles towards the cabinet where he keeps his clean clothes. “I wasn’t expecting to be woken up so early.”

He hears surprise, next. “Early? Not quite. It’s a quarter till ten. I came here to bring you breakfast - well, the last of it I could find.”

Erik freezes in the act of lining up the plackets on a fresh shirt. “A quarter till ten?”

“You must have really needed the sleep.”

“I’ve been studying,” Erik says. 

“Yes, you have,” Charles says. “So I think you’ve more than earned your holiday today.”

He exchanges yesterday’s trousers for a new pair; he doesn’t feel anything like embarrassment or shyness as he continues to get dressed. “Is that why you’re here? To make sure I don’t do any studying?”

“Don’t shoot me; I’m the one who drew the short straw,” Charles says, sounding admonishing. “Jean told the others about you over breakfast. Sean suggested one of us sit on you today, figuratively speaking, of course. I wasn’t going to be involved, but Betsy put a straw in for me.”

“And you lost, so you’re here,” Erik says, and taps his way to the tiny dining table. It’s even smaller than the one in his apartment.

As he sits down, he’s hit by a pang of memory. He wonders if Ilyana misses him. He misses her presence keenly, her bright voice.

He wishes he could buy some fresh fruit from Mr Hammond’s stand. 

“Erik?”

“Excuse me,” Erik says. He taps his fingertips over the table, finds utensils and a plate all set out for him.

He listens to Charles: the quiet rattle and clink of dishes appearing on the table. 

“Bread, chicken stew, someone’s idea of mixed fruits in syrup,” Charles says. “I suggest being cautious with that last. I have no idea if they’re still any good.”

Erik grins. “Do I hear a hint of complaint? I was just thinking about fresh fruits right now. Perhaps the last of the plums at the fruit seller’s.” He spoons some stew onto his plate, tears a chunk of bread from the loaf. “If you have fruit here I could perhaps make something with them, keep them from going to waste. I can make bread, or something, though you’ll have to look at it for me and tell me if it looks right.”

“Perhaps later,” Charles says. He sounds pleasantly surprised, now. “When we come back.”

“Come back? Where are we going?”

“Another suggestion from the people who call themselves my team,” Charles says, laughing quietly. “It’s time you knew just a little more about this place. Section 8 isn’t just about anechoic rooms and radio receivers and telegraph keys and cryptography, you know.”

Erik chews and swallows thoughtfully. “Of course not. Apparently you concern yourselves with clandestine operations as well.”

“That too. Come on. I’ve borrowed one of the jeeps for the day.”

“Should I bring an umbrella?”

“No need.”

While part of him bemoans the day that he could have spent just fine by himself - he could be thinking about Morse code, or he could be thinking about music - Erik finds himself hurrying through his breakfast and through the rest of his ablutions, finds himself checking to see that his satchel has got all of its usual contents. 

He follows the sound of Charles’s voice out of his room, down the usual flight of stairs with its twenty-four steps, over cement and thence to a paved lot, where he taps his cane against a bulk of metal that smells like gasoline and old paint and scorched rubber. “Is this thing even safe?” he asks, after he figures out where the passenger seat is and folds himself into it.

“Of course it is,” is the cheerful reply. “It’s still got all four of its wheels, hasn’t it?”

“You have got to be kidding me,” Erik says, and then the jeep lurches forward with a roar that makes his teeth rattle. 

“Oh, and I’ve been meaning to ask,” Charles says as he whips the jeep around a series of tight S-bends, “You signed off with two dashes last night. The letter M? Or something else entirely?”

“Kindly focus on the road,” Erik says, hanging on with all his might. “I’m not interested in crashing and burning and dying, thank you very much.”

“You’ll get used to it, like the others did.” Charles whistles a snatch of cheerful melody, vaguely familiar, completely out of place to Erik’s ears. “And if you think I’m a bad driver, here’s something to think about: we never, never, not even in the direst of emergency situations, allow Sean to get behind the wheel.”

Erik swears, faintly, and then goes back to clenching his jaw.

In all the rattling, past all the sharp curves taken at whiplash speed, he can feel that they’re climbing, a long sweep of steep slope. The day gets both warmer and cooler: he can feel the heat of sunlight on his hand and on his knees, and he can feel the breeze as it sharpens.

And then he takes the next breath, full of the scents of flowers and of pine, and he’s startled enough to ask, “Charles - what - ”

“Almost there,” is the joyful reply.

Inexplicably they careen _down_ another stretch of road before there’s a sharp jerk, and the jeep heels over hard to the left, and then Charles is killing the engine, and the abrupt silence pierces Erik through to the bone.

He takes a moment to catch his breath. Opens his mouth - but the words are torn away by a vivid phrase of birdsong, flashing past as if directly overhead. When he finally speaks he knows he sounds shaken. “Where are we?”

“In the western part of Providence, partway up the Claremont Rockies,” is the answer. “The post is built around a concentration of communications towers linking several parts of the country. We can listen in to quite a lot of frequencies here, because of the altitude.”

That accounts for the smells, for the sounds. “I’ve never been out this way before,” he says slowly. “I used to do a lot of traveling, but it was always from one city to another. Always going where there could be a proper stage, a proper piano.”

“Playing to sold-out audiences, yes?” Charles asks. From the sound of his voice he’s come around the jeep and is now standing on Erik’s right side, about an arm’s length away. “You were quite the popular draw, as we understand it.”

“So you do know something about me.” Erik shrugs, smiles, shakes his head. 

“A few things, yes.” A moment’s silence, which is filled with the wind, and with the rustling glass. Another bird cries out, melodious and over-exuberant. “Shall we walk?”

“Yes, please.” Erik tucks his cane under his arm and reaches out for Charles’s arm or his shoulder. He makes contact with Charles’s wrist, and holds on firmly. “Lead on.”

Charles sets a brisk pace, and though Erik keenly watches his steps against the possibility of tripping he’s more than happy to keep up. 

But the world around him is distracting, and beautifully so: he can feel and hear the crunch of dry leaves beneath his feet. Now that he knows he’s in the mountains, he can resolve the sounds surrounding him: the wind that calls and the echoes that reply. 

His fingers itch. He wants to stop. He wants to sit and take it all in, and try to capture the day in music, and he tugs on Charles’s wrist. “Can we stop?”

“We’re almost at the best place to stop,” Charles says, almost apologetically. “Trust me?”

Erik finds himself nodding. “All right.”

“Careful here, we’re heading upwards a bit,” is the next thing that Charles says.

When he stops, Erik takes a deep breath, and tries to orient himself - and he swallows his pride, gives in to his curiosity. “Tell me where we are now, Charles, please.”

“Of course. I suppose you can hear all the rustling overhead? We are standing in a grove of trees. I can never remember what they’re called. It’s a failing, I know. But they provide a lot of shade and they look almost unforgivably picturesque into the bargain.”

Erik smiles, and remembers a sewing machine in use. He doesn’t have to remember that long-ago wind, because he can hear it right now. “I think I can imagine. Continue, please.”

“There is a cluster of rocks near the center of the grove, mostly worn down. One of the rocks is almost completely flat. I tend to use it as a place to sit down. Shall I lead you over to it?”

Erik nods, and steps carefully in Charles’s wake; when Charles stops Erik puts out his hands, searching, and nods when he makes contact with cool, mostly smooth rock. “Here, I suppose.” He sits down, arranging his satchel and his cane within easy reach, and he leans back on his hands and takes his surroundings in.

Rustlings from nearby; he feels Charles’s presence recede, but when Charles speaks again his voice is still coming from close by. “I like coming here, when I’m not being sent out to do things,” Charles says. “I like the people in Section 8, and I am unreasonably fond of Betsy and Jean and Sean, but one wishes to be by oneself sometimes, and here I can hear myself think.”

“You can do that just fine in the basement,” Erik points out. “But you’d have to close the door.”

“No thank you,” Charles says, amused and firm at the same time. “As far as I know, the only person who voluntarily spends time in there is Emma. I don’t know how she does it, and I’m not sure I want to know _why_. The quiet in there would drive me mad.”

Erik nods. “I understand.” Then he remembers Charles’s question from earlier. “Why are you curious about the two dashes? About the letter M?”

“So it is that? It’s not in code or anything?”

“It’s not,” Erik says. “I just thought it would be appropriate to have some kind of signature. So people would know that a given transmission was coming from me. It doesn’t have to mean anything.” He thinks for a moment, then adds, “But now you’re going to tell me that there’s no need for it, or that it might be dangerous to have some kind of identification, even if false.”

“No to both counts,” Charles says, “since all of the operators here have some kind of identifier as well.” The next thing he says is, “You have a quick mind for details.”

“I’m a composer, Charles. Of course I have to pay attention to details. I have to understand certain kinds of logic.”

Charles chuckles quietly. “And I suppose that’s come in handy for you. You are, after all, engaged in an active listening process.”

“I am, yes,” Erik says, smiling. “And you are right. To me Morse code is notation, too. I just have to remember sometimes that it’s a different sort of notation entirely - I’ve caught myself waiting impatiently for the next set of instruments to come in, or for the melody line to begin. I keep paying attention to the rhythm and so I wait for the next part of the song to begin, to no avail.”

The reward for that admission is a hearty laugh, and Erik listens to the echoes of Charles’s amusement, and can’t help but smile, and wonder what Charles’s laughter might feel like under his fingertips.

After a moment he’s moved enough to find his notebook and the awl on its leather cord, and he turns to a fresh page. Lightly he scores in a stave; he thinks of a brisk little tune, something to walk to or work to, and he waits for the wind to give him a melodic phrase.

“If Emma Frost is here tomorrow, or the day after that,” Charles offers after a stretch of silence, “we might be able to start you on the real work.” He sounds a little worried when he continues. “We’ve managed to recover some of the stations that we’d lost, but I’m thinking we’ve been careless; we’ve been lucky and unlucky at the same time. We need to do better. We have to do better.”

“It sounds even more urgent than you first made it out to be.”

Charles clicks his tongue. He sounds like he’d like to stand up and pace. “I am not supposed to be talking to you about these matters, not yet, not when we haven’t tested your skills in a real setting yet. But you need the context, and you might as well hear it from me.” A deep breath follows, but Charles doesn’t sound any calmer when he starts again. “Genosha is planning something, and they never plan by halves. I don’t know how large this one is going to be - but it _will_ draw attention, and will very likely mean shots fired, or casualties, or both.”

“I don’t understand,” Erik says. “They have already missed a few chances to attack, if they were going to do that. Independence Day came and went and nothing happened, except that the streets were filled with revelers and far too much smoke. And last year’s elections - there was a lot of noise, and I couldn’t stop hearing about it on the news, but that was it. People gave up their positions and people took new positions or kept their old ones. Things were about as peaceful as they could get during a time of transition. If Genosha wanted to kick up a fuss, that would have been an excellent opportunity. Yet there was nothing.”

“Which is why Emma Frost is taking absolutely no chances,” Charles says. “I trust her instincts.”

“That is not what I am questioning,” Erik says, and finishes one part of his melody. He draws in the next measure, and gets to work on the next phrase. “My question is still, why now.”

“Because Janos Quested has been found, and he is dead,” Charles says, and it’s like the world suddenly goes cold.

The awl drops from Erik’s fingers. Numb and nerveless and shocked. He repeats the name, shivering as he does. “Janos Quested. I wasn’t expecting to hear that name here. Is it really that small a world?” he asks.

“You know him?” The shock in Charles’s voice is different.

“We were - we knew each other, yes,” Erik says. He clenches his hands into fists. He remembers the distress in Angel’s voice, the last time he’d spoken to her. “I lived next door to him for a short time, soon after I was discharged from the hospital after my accident. He wound up helping me from time to time. We became friends, and we stayed friends, even after I moved to a different neighborhood.” He swallows, and his throat is parched, and the next words hurt. “He has a sister. Her name is Angel. He told me that they only had each other in this world, no other family members - ” 

Charles swears, quietly, sadly. “I almost wish I hadn’t asked.”

“How do you know him,” Erik asks. “Tell me what happened. Please.”

He expects Charles to put him off, to say that he’s not supposed to know these things.

Charles sits down next to him, sighs heavily, starts to talk. “To put it very briefly, Janos is - was - one of us. One of our very best telegraph men, to be specific. We had him listening in to pretty much the entire capital. He was always very scrupulous in his dispatches. And he had quite a network of his very own - he seemed to be on top of all of the news. We joked he’d make a good field leader, that the job was his if he ever wanted it, he only had to ask Emma Frost and she’d promote him. But he never wanted that position - he just wanted to listen, and he just wanted to keep Providence safe.

“It’s difficult to speak of him in the past tense. Just last week, or the week before that, we were still receiving his reports. It was - unsettling, to say the least, when one of our agents reported him missing.” Another sigh. “When I went to the city to look for you, Jean went to look for him. On her return she said she’d had some success in tracing his whereabouts, that she’d turned over the investigation to the rest of the group he had been working with. But the news came in very early this morning. I had it from Emma Frost herself.”

“You sounded so cheerful this morning,” Erik says.

“I was,” Charles says. “Sort of. I put away the part of me that was mourning the loss, and the part of me that wanted to rush out and avenge the death. I have to go on, you see; I have to go about my tasks.”

“Your tasks. Meaning me.”

“Don’t take it personally.” Charles’s hand touches his shoulder, warm, but ghosting. “I really did want to make sure that you were all right. I really did want to show you this place. But I was also carrying that news along in the back of my mind.”

“I never heard it in your voice,” Erik says. “You’re - you were acting that everything was fine. You’re a good actor.”

“I should hope so,” is the unexpected answer. “If I weren’t one, I’d be dead several times over. But just because I can act that nothing is amiss, doesn’t mean that nothing really is amiss.”

Erik nods. Some part of him understands, though another part of him is profoundly disconcerted by Charles, by who Charles is and what he might actually be.

He wants to ask Charles questions, wants to know more about Charles, but his mind is still fixated on Janos, and he suddenly remembers something. “The last time I met with Janos,” he says quietly, “he was carrying a strip of paper with him. At the time he gave it to me, I didn’t even know what it was, but now that I think about it, it’s the type of paper that you use with your telegraph keys here.”

Charles sounds surprised. “He gave it to you?”

“I don’t know if he did it on purpose; I was going to ask him, when next we met. I suppose that will never happen now.” Erik flips to the very back of his notebook, and wracks his memories for the pattern on the tape that he now knows to be composed of dots and dashes. Tries to “hear” the sounds that the message would have made, when it was being sent or received. “I think this was what was written on the tape.”

Morse code on the paper, drawn in with the awl. When he finishes he tears the page out and hands it over to Charles. “I hope that means something to you. It was in some kind of code, wasn’t it?”

Silence, except for the wind in the trees, and now Erik thinks that the wind sounds like weeping. He wants to shed a few tears himself.

He wants to sit down at a radio receiver, wants to put a pair of headphones on, wants to find a Morse code station and listen in to its transmissions.

“Charles,” he prompts, as the silence stretches and stretches.

“It’s not in code,” Charles says, at last. He sounds shocked. “If this really is the message he passed to you - I find it hard to believe. Don’t misunderstand me, Erik. I am just trying to understand why Janos would pass this message on to _you_. It would have been useless to you if we had never made contact, and it would have been fatal to us if you had decided to go with Selene and her group.”

Erik freezes in place for a moment. Begins to nod, as he takes Charles’s words in.

It’s hard to speak because his mind is still reeling, but he forces his question out. “What does the message say, Charles?”

“It says _Hornet in flight_ ,” Charles says.

“Hornet. You’ve told me about him,” Erik says.

“We did, yes.” There’s a sound, and a firm step. “Erik. Would you mind it if we went back to the post, right now?”

“I won’t, Charles, not if you tell me I can get to work.”

“Doing what?”

“Listening for your enemy stations.”

“I should say _no_ , but under the circumstances, I don’t think I - we - can refuse. Come on. We’ve got to make contact with Emma Frost. I don’t care where she is, I don’t care what she’s doing. What you and I have been talking about has to be the priority now. And after she knows what happened we can start figuring out what we have to do next. Time is not on our side.”

“No, no it’s not.” Erik grasps the hand that’s offered him, and he holds on tightly, and he knows that he’s thrown his lot in with Section 8.

Charles drives them back at breakneck speed - and faster. Erik doesn’t complain and doesn’t think about the danger. He’s too busy thinking about Janos, and about what he’s just learned, and about what must be coming next.

He hears his own heartbeat, loud in his ears, and he thinks of the ruffle of distant drums, coming steadily closer.


	8. Chapter 8

Emma Frost walks past him. Solemn lines in the corners of her eyes, her mouth a tight line of pain and of sadness, but all he can see is the anger that blazes in every wire-tense line of her form.

Behind him some of the codebreakers are whispering fearfully among themselves: “Never saw her wear anything else before.” “It’s not right! She’s wearing _black_!” “Black everything including her lipstick, that’s not something I want to see again - ”

“Better hope not,” a voice cuts in. “Because she only wears black when one of us is dead. So if you don’t want to see something like this again, don’t get yourselves killed.”

Charles shakes his head, looks over his shoulder. Directly behind him, Sean is still frowning at everyone else. The expression sits oddly on his brow. Charles knows him and knows his ready smiles, his needling, his sardonic laughter.

All of those things are out of place in the here and now, however, and so Charles watches as Sean shifts from foot to foot. The shoulderboards of his dress uniform are awkwardly and comically large, and clash against the vivid reds and oranges of his hair.

“I don’t like funerals,” Betsy whispers, next, on Charles’s right. “I never have. That which was animating the body is gone; it’s a husk now, it’s inert. What does it care about ceremonies? About posthumous honors?”

“It doesn’t matter to the body, but it does matter to the rest of us,” is Jean’s reply. “I’d like to remember that the person we’re saying goodbye to was, well, he really was a person. We knew him. You knew him.”

“I did,” Betsy says, after a moment. She bows her head, and clenches her handkerchief in her hands. “He was kind. And he was brilliant.”

Charles blinks when he hears the material tear. He reaches in his pocket.

“Here,” Erik says from where he’s sitting on Betsy’s other side, beating Charles to the draw. “You might need it. Or you might want to tear something else up.”

She blanches. “I couldn’t possibly - ”

“Go ahead,” Erik says with a solemn nod.

Charles watches him put his hands behind his back. Watches Betsy try to return his handkerchief - but Erik is immovable. He refuses to accept what she’s handing back to him.

Up front, Emma Frost holds out her black-gloved hand to one of the men standing behind her.

“Ma’am,” the man says, loud in the hush of Section 8’s mourning, and he passes a familiar-looking shotgun to her. Charles has seen her carry it before; it’s a damned heavy thing, he knows that from personal experience, and yet she lifts it easily when she has cause to use it, as she does now. It is her own piece, and it gleams from stock to muzzle.

Someone barks out an order, and Charles snaps to attention, salutes crisply.

The others follow suit around him.

All except Erik, who bows his head.

Charles can see the tic in his jaw, spasming.

Emma Frost fires the first shot, and the roar of it rattles Charles’s teeth.

Behind her, the coffin containing what’s left of Janos Quested is lowered into the earth.

Erik jerks back at the second volley: the shotgun, plus four rifles. He raises his hands to cover his ears.

Charles winces in sympathy, but it’s only after the third volley is fired and the assembly begins to break up in complete silence that he’s able to approach Erik. A deliberate tread, heavier than is his wont, so that the other man will know he’s there. “Are you all right?”

Erik shakes his head, fractionally, rapidly. “Just - I’m not used to those kinds of sounds.”

“Not much use for guns here at the post,” Charles says. “You wouldn’t be the only one complaining.”

There are tears coursing down Erik’s cheeks, and he doesn’t move to wipe them away. “You buried - a comrade,” he says. “To me he was a friend. And I feel worse about this because at least I know where he is, I know where he sleeps. There are others who knew him, who loved him, and they cannot know what happened to him. They can’t know he’s dead, and they won’t know where he’s buried.”

Erik sobs, quietly, and says a name. 

“Angel.”

Charles swallows around a hard lump in his throat. He doesn’t know what to say.

A step behind him, a ringing step, and he’s familiar with this one.

But the voice that speaks does not address him.

Emma Frost walks up to them, and speaks to Erik. “Forgive me for overhearing you, Mister Lehnsherr,” she says, her voice rough with emotion. “I did not know that you had a connection to Janos until Charles told me. Perhaps I should have designated you next of kin instead.”

“I wasn’t that,” Erik tells her, a catch in his own voice. “I was - we knew each other. He helped me from time to time, and I had hoped to repay his many little kindnesses somehow. And now - I understand that I won’t be able to write to Janos’s family and friends, I can’t tell them what happened. I do know why, and I won’t break the rules. But I don’t mind letting you know that right now, those rules hurt.”

“They do,” Emma Frost says. “I wish that there was some way to explain without putting anyone in danger. But there is nothing for it.”

Erik nods, and takes off his sunglasses so he can swipe at his tears.

Charles reaches for his hand, passes him his handkerchief.

Erik doesn’t refuse it. He blows his nose quietly. “Excuse me.”

“Walk with me, both of you,” Emma Frost says.

Charles falls in at her left side. He watches Erik compose himself and tap his way to her right.

“I won’t waste your time with preliminaries and platitudes,” she says, “as we are running out of days, and there is an immense amount of work that needs to be done. So, briefly: I have seen your results, Mister Lehnsherr, and I am pleased to welcome you to Section 8. Someone will be along shortly to take you around to the telegraphy group. We have not seen anyone with your ability in some time, and we have high hopes that you will be able to help us find the missing stations, and perhaps to detect new ones.”

Charles raises an eyebrow at her. “Someone will be along to take him downstairs. That ought to be me, because that’s the procedure: the person who brought the new operator in helps them get settled in their actual work. Which means - you’ve got a job for me.”

“I do,” Emma Frost says, without faltering in her stride. 

The featureless grays and shuttered windows of the living quarters rise around them, cold and stark, and a breeze ruffles the fallen leaves that have been blown into this passage. Charles wishes he could shiver; instead he simply puts his hands into his pockets. “Let’s have it, then.”

“It’ll be a delicate task, Charles, and a very dangerous one. And I won’t be able to send any backup with you.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time.”

That gets him a thin, colorless smile. “No, nor will it be the last.”

On her other side, Erik abruptly stops - and Emma Frost stops with him. “Should I even be here for this conversation?”

“Yes,” she tells him. “When I said that I couldn’t send any backup with Charles I didn’t mean that he had to be completely alone. That is not how we work, Mister Lehnsherr.”

“I see,” Erik says, faintly. “And perhaps you should call me Erik, if I am one of yours now.”

“Very well, Erik. Oh, and watch the stairs; we are going up to my office.”

Charles elects to go up last: this way he can watch Erik’s back, and give him directions if he needs it.

The tap-tap of Erik’s cane never falters. 

“You’re getting used to this place, I see,” Emma Frost says. 

“Some parts of it are more familiar than most,” Erik says.

“Good. And you will have to become familiar with the rest of it, as well.” 

Emma Frost pauses at a black door, pushes it open with a careless thrust of her hand, strides through. 

Charles goes straight to the huge desk on the other side of the room. There are two chairs placed opposite each other. “Over here, Erik,” he says.

He watches Erik navigate the room: the decisive movements of his cane, checking the floor for obstacles and steering around them. The way he scuffs his feet and tilts his head to listen to the echoes that he creates. 

When his cane strikes the lower edge of the desk, Erik puts out a hand to touch the top surface, feels along its edges to find the empty chair.

“There you go,” Charles says.

Erik nods in his direction and sits down. 

Last of all Emma Frost rounds the desk. Folders and files in neat stacks, and an ornate cup full of pens and pencils - but the thing she picks up is instead a strip of paper tape, which has been stapled to a handful of pages of paper, closely covered in typescript. “Your task,” she says, simply, when she passes it over.

The strip of paper tape with its familiar dots and dashes is more than familiar - it’s the message Janos passed on to Erik, his last transmission. “I know this message, and so does Erik,” Charles says. “It’s the _Hornet in flight_ message.”

“Yes,” she says. “Read on.”

_Hornet’s presence confirmed in Providence. Known associates: Selene, Flemyng, his own telegraph team (estimate 3-4 members)._

_Follow Hornet’s activities. Establish his objectives. Cover identity and further suggestions to be detailed below._

Charles quickly scans the rest of the pages. “This is quite a lot of information; I can’t imagine how long it took Moira and the others to gather it.”

“Not long at all. Our target is not exactly attempting to be discreet.”

“No, no, he wouldn’t be, not if he’s trying to get married. I feel sorry for the lady already.”

Erik snorts. “Your target - codename ‘Hornet’ - is getting _married_?”

“An unfortunate result of the world moving on, and the easily manipulated nature of the media,” Emma Frost says sardonically. “He’s been very careful to separate himself from the attacks that he most certainly planned or at least financed; instead, he’s been presenting himself as a man about town, some kind of feckless eligible bachelor, and now he’s making waves as someone who’s been caught at last.”

“I doubt it,” Erik says.

“And so do we. That part will be up to you. Your part of this task is to listen for anything and everything connected to codename ‘Hornet’. Every bit of news will be helpful. Find the lady, find the rest of his associates.” 

“That on top of finding your missing enemy stations.”

Charles shakes his head at the sharp glitter in her eyes. “Section 8 and I have absolute faith in your skills, Erik.”

Unexpectedly, Erik smiles. His sightless eyes swing towards Charles. “You will have to designate someone to watch over me,” he says. “Else I will get lost in my work once again.”

Charles smiles back, and for a moment, he wishes that Erik could see it. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Perhaps I might also offer you a solution for that,” Emma Frost offers after a moment’s thought. “I received an - unusual request from Betsy Braddock, Charles, and I was wondering if you could shed some light on it.”

Charles raises his eyebrows at her. “Betsy actually went ahead and requested the piano?”

“What piano?” Erik asks. He sounds interested, and hopeful, and disbelieving.

Charles watches Emma Frost turn in Erik’s direction. “The piano was mine, purchased for me in my youth, when my parents were convinced I should be a musical prodigy. I had lessons with well-known teachers, I participated in a few recitals, but eventually I gave up on the music - it wasn’t what I wanted to devote my life to. I had a middling talent at best.”

“A middling talent is still talent,” Erik says.

“Thank you. I’m led to believe yours is orders of magnitude greater than mine,” she says. “So I’d be pleased - and quite honored, to be frank - if you chose to use the piano I’d left behind. It is all in tune; I have been able to care for it and keep it in condition. All it wants is to be used, to be played, as any musical instrument should be.”

Something lights up in Erik’s expression, then. “Where is the piano? Is it here?”

“As to that,” Emma Frost says. She raises an eyebrow at Charles.

Charles stares back at her, steadily. “You put it in my quarters?”

“Not in your quarters. You know as well as I do that there isn’t enough space. The piano, Charles, is in your office.”

He thinks about that for a moment, and then nods. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” A brief smile, no less warm for all she’s still wearing severe black, for all that there are sorrowful lines remaining in her face. “That will be all for today, gentlemen. You have your work to get ready for.”

Charles gets to his feet. “We do at that.” He offers her his hand. “I hope to come back soon.”

“We’ll need you,” she says, shaking his hand firmly. “Good luck, Charles.”

“Thank you.”

Out on the steps, he turns to Erik. “I just realized that you haven’t been to my office yet. Do you want to come and visit it now, and find this piano in the process, or would you prefer to wait until tomorrow? I’ll likely be gone by then, so I can send Sean or one of the others over to your quarters in the morning, before you begin work.”

Erik shakes his head. “I would rather not be idle.”

Charles nods, understanding. “To be honest, I don’t want to stop working or moving either. My things are at my office anyway, and you can get started with the piano, though you shouldn’t stay long. You’ll want to rest. Come on.”

They have to walk past one of the mess halls in order to get there - and Charles raises a hand to Jean and to Betsy, who are huddled next to a smoking Jericho. “Everything all right?” he asks.

Jean shuffles her feet and shrugs, one-shouldered, frowning.

Betsy still has Erik’s handkerchief clutched in her hand.

“They’ll want some kind of distraction,” Jericho says, gravely.

“Hello, Jericho,” Erik says, from behind Charles.

“Hello, Erik. You staying with us?”

“Yes, I believe I am.”

“Good. You let me know when you’ve got a little time. I’ve a couple of other crosswords I want to finish.”

“I might not be working in the anechoic rooms for a while.”

“Let me know anyway,” Jericho says. He shuffles over to Erik and puts a hand on his shoulder, before retracing his steps and going back into the hall.

“Where are you off to this time,” Jean asks after a moment. “I thought we all had the rest of the day off.”

“We do, but something’s come up, so we need to be getting to the office,” Charles says. “We might need your help.”

“Anything’s better than doing nothing,” Betsy says. 

“Even clipping out articles?” Jean asks.

“Even that, and you know how much I hate doing that.”

“I think we can do better than that,” Charles tells them, and he smiles, just a little, when they both turn skeptical expressions on him.

///

The keys are covered with a long strip of felt, soft and smooth underneath Erik’s fingertips. He pulls the material away, folds it into thirds, sets it atop the frame.

It wasn’t that long ago that he was sitting at an untuned grand piano; its middle C had jangled and creaked, instead of resonating. Instead of sending up a soaring powerful note.

Now there is an upright piano before him, and it smells pleasantly like dust and like wood polish and like lint, and he reaches out to its keys and strikes middle C.

He can’t help but smile at the sound that the piano produces: a full-throated cry, beautifully sonorous. If he listens to the vibrating echoes he can almost find the low ceiling and the hard floor of what seems to be the small suite of rooms that Charles and his team prefer to work in when they are here at the post.

“That sounds good,” Jean offers after a moment. “Though I don’t really know much about music. I know even less about the piano; I only know what I’ve read. Sorry, Erik.”

He shakes his head. “No need to apologize. The piano will mean something to you that will likely be different from what it means to me. That doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy it all together.”

“What did you have in mind to play?” Charles asks. He sounds a little far away, and the words are accompanied by the ruffle of papers being sorted.

“I don’t know,” Erik says, but even as he says the words out loud he’s already reaching for a series of chords. The music skitters pleasantly, playfully, and he nods in approval. 

He positions his feet at the pedals. “This will not be my best work,” he says, warningly. “I play the piano, yes, and it’s been said I have a talent for it - but I haven’t been practicing regularly. I’m nowhere near being good enough to give a recital; what I’m going to do now won’t sound very nice.”

“I don’t care if it sounds good or bad,” Betsy says. “I just want to hear you play.”

Erik nods, and closes his eyes. Thinks of trills and of a famously ornamented melody line, slow and contemplative. He takes a deep breath. The sheet music appears in his mind; he’ll have to sight-read some of it, but he finds that he doesn’t really mind.

He looks over his shoulder and says, “Bach, the _Goldberg Variations_. It is said that the Aria, which contains the theme that is being played with in the variations, is actually the very first variation. I would rather leave that debate to those who would know the master better. I don’t have much of an opinion on it myself.” 

“I think I might have heard this one,” Charles ventures. “Or pieces of it. But my memory might also be playing tricks on me.”

Erik continues to think on his memories of the keyboard and of the score. A high degree of ornamentation; a complicated arrangement that allowed for one person to play the whole thing through on a standard piano. The piece was originally designed to be played on an instrument with a two-manual keyboard, such as a harpsichord. His hands moving up and down the keys. He thinks of a metronome to set his tempo. 

He strikes the first notes, makes a mistake right away when he slips on one of the ornaments, but he soldiers on, and after a moment he begins to fall more easily into the rhythm of the piece. He will have to play at a slower pace than is standard. Some of the variations will require much more dexterity than he currently has or can muster.

In the past he’d played a lot of music from other composers - Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, Chopin - and he’d played Bach, of course, but he’d never attempted to perform the _Variations_ on stage. They had never come up as a subject for his interpretation, but he remembers hearing a recording. He remembers the nights spent between rehearsals of other pieces, learning each of the thirty variations and then having to switch back to whatever he was actually slated to perform. 

He remembers, now, the pleasure of listening to and then recreating the famous elaborations, and he anticipates the runs up and down the keyboard, the startling and often dazzling differences from one variation to another.

Just as he finishes up the Aria - he plays the last notes with a little extra flourish - he hears Charles draw in a deep breath, and can’t help but smile, safe in the knowledge that no one is on his other side and that means the expression is hidden. 

There are missteps and little fumbles and missed sharps. He plays a handful of eighth notes in the wrong order, a grievous mistake - one that would have made him stop in mid-section and angrily start over, if he’d committed it in the past, when he could see and when he could see the world from the vantage point of center stage.

Today, playing for the others - and perhaps for Janos as well - the mistakes don’t matter. He shrugs them off easily, and keeps playing. The music wraps around him in all of its complexity, in all of its passion, until the beat of his heart is lost in the rhythm of his hands moving.

From time to time he thinks he might hear voices, soft exclamations behind him, and he has just enough presence of mind to distinguish Jean from Betsy from Charles. A distant part of him wants to hear what they’re saying, wants to hear Charles’s opinion, since he’d mentioned at the start that he might actually know the _Variations_. 

But the music is all and he can’t help but want to laugh, as he remembers the sequence of variations and as he remembers the individual themes. Complexity, tempo, the frequency at which he needs to cross his hands, one over the other. 

Strange that it’s been a long time since he did something like this, since he’s had the pure pleasure of just sitting at a piano and playing just for himself and for his own amusement. That’s not entirely true, because he knows about the others sitting or standing nearby, but in this particular moment he thinks he can be selfish. 

He still has this - he still has the ability to hear these beautiful notes. More importantly, he can still produce them. It doesn’t matter that he can’t see the keyboard. It doesn’t matter that he can’t see the piano, though he does wish for sight, just for a fleeting instant, so that he can better appreciate the instrument that he is working with. What matters is that he and the instrument come together and create this place and time, where the music catches him up and carries him away, where all he has to do is play and the melodies flow through him, heedless and powerful.

He’s most of the way through the seventeenth variation when there’s a knock on the door, too sharp and too loud, and he loses his place. His hands stop 

dead on the keys.

He thinks he hears Betsy curse softly.

But it’s Charles’s voice that he actually hears: “...Already? I’d lost track of the time - I’m sorry - give me a few moments, please.”

An unfamiliar voice answers: “You’ll want to hurry, sir.”

“Yes, yes, I will,” Charles says.

Erik reluctantly takes his hands off the keyboard. He interlaces his fingers together, puts his hands in his lap instead. “Your - mission,” he tells Charles’s agitated footsteps, coming closer. “Important work to do, and not nearly enough time to do it in.”

“I am really very sorry to have interrupted you,” Charles says. “I would have liked to hear the whole thing, or at least to have completed that variation.”

“This is only the first time I’m playing this piece. It likely won’t be the last.”

“I would like to come back and hear you play it through, from the beginning to the end.”

“I’d like that as well.” He reaches out, trying for Charles’s sleeve or some other part of his shirt - but once again his fingers find Charles’s wrist. This time, instead of hanging on, he taps his fingertips twice against the bared skin. “You must come back alive.”

“I was rather hoping I would,” is the quiet reply. “And you have my word I’ll do my best to do just that.” Another pause. A quiet laugh. “And in return I ask you to work hard. Listen well. Any information you can gather, any new or old stations you can find - anything and everything will be helpful. I’ll need every last scrap.”

Erik nods, slowly, remembering his tasks and his responsibilities in the here and now. “I - yes,” he says. “I have my work to do as well. I can help you from here.”

“Only remember to be reasonable,” Charles says.

As much as Erik would like to say something to that, he can also feel Charles pull away, called back to his work, and he can only turn on the piano bench as Charles’s presence leaves him, hurrying. Those receding footsteps, picking up in tempo. His parting words to the others: “Work hard, and look after each other.”

Jean says, “Come back alive,” and Betsy says, “Don’t do anything too stupid!”

Erik concentrates, and listens to two sets of footsteps moving away - and after that, the wheeze and smoky roar of engines, faint and getting fainter.

Silence falls in the office.

“There’s no point in staying here,” Jean says after a moment. 

“Not until tomorrow,” Erik agrees, and he puts the piano back in order, closes the lid over the keys. A sharp _click_ that echoes throughout the room for a moment.

He follows the women out, and they walk back to the living quarters, and no one says a word.

The wind whistles forlornly, high and distant.

“Good to have you here,” Betsy says, eventually. “Tomorrow I’ll take you to where you’ll be working.”

“Thank you,” Erik says.

He taps his way up the stairs to his quarters, and he double-checks the locks on the door once he’s inside. He lies down on his bed, fully clothed. 

Worry is like a broken metronome, he thinks. In his mind’s eye he sees the needle break stride, oscillating more and more wildly.

He worries for Angel, who must remain in the dark as to her brother’s fate.

He worries for Jean and for Betsy, who for all their kind words still sound troubled by the remains of the day.

He worries for Charles, who is speeding away and getting farther from the post with each passing moment, and who needs his help.

He can only hope that he’ll be up to the task.

In the end, he attempts to dispel the mood by forcing himself to go back to the _Variations_ : he starts over from the interrupted variation, the seventeenth. He can take the time to be perfect. He tries to think of himself in coat and tails, an outfit he’d gotten more than used to wearing, night after night, once upon a time. He tries to think of sitting down to a gleaming grand piano, and the heat of the spotlights on the back of his neck.

He thinks of a vast concert hall and he thinks of rows upon rows of seats.

He plays the remainder of the work, thinks of his hands working over black and white, the keys responding to him and to the music. From canon to toccata and back again, leaping from emotion to emotion and measure to measure, through to the thirtieth variation and then to the restatement of the Aria.

The last image in Erik’s mind before he falls into an exhausted, fitful sleep: the emptiness of the concert hall, and the human-shaped shadow sitting a few rows back from the stage. 

To that shape he assigns the name _Charles_.


	9. Chapter 9

Dead silence in Erik’s ears.

The pressure and the presence of the person who leads the telegraph men and women of Section 8: Phillip Coulson.

He’s only just met the man, who has been standing right over his shoulder for the entire short time that Erik’s known him.

But there’s nothing oppressive about that distance, or rather the marked lack of it.

In fact, Erik feels exactly the opposite: he feels that there’s someone looking out for him. He feels like there’s someone watching him closely, but not to notice the nervous thrill running along his nerves, and certainly not to berate him for it.

Coulson makes Erik think of stability and of steadiness, and of a quiet kind of encouragement.

He’s still not as steady and soothing as Charles’s presence is, though.

But Charles is not here.

Erik takes a deep breath.

The silence is broken when Coulson speaks: “Ah, thank you,” he says to approaching footsteps.

To Erik, he says, “Will you mind if I listen in to whatever it is you’ll find?”

Erik raises his eyebrows. “Pardon me, but how are you going to accomplish that exactly?”

“I’m going to plug another set of headphones into the cable between you and the transceiver set. It’s a - call it a habit that I have, a peculiar one. When I work with new people. Will you mind?”

Understanding dawns, and Erik shakes his head. “Not at all.”

“Thank you.” 

There’s a click, and the quiet sounds of someone grappling with more than one length of cable. A brief whine of feedback.

Coulson clears his throat before he speaks again:

“Ready when you are, Mister Lehnsherr.”

Erik nods and reaches for the tuning knob.

He turns the knob to the left, first - a series of delicate twitches of his fingers, going down the band slowly and carefully. Snatches of music fade in and fade out as he goes. Fragments of spoken words, falling away, and then he hears static, an incessant buzzing as though of a swarm of very large bees, hovering just inches away.

A skip in the blurring buzz, a clicking that could almost be familiar, and he dials around it, toward it, homing in on it as carefully and as precisely as he can. He leans in towards the receiver, close enough that he can smell the dust on it.

His other hand is curled around the telegraph key, tense and waiting, ready to play its part.

He catches another sequence of clicking sounds.

Closer, closer, and the clicks begin to resolve - there’s nothing random about them - he can hear the dots and dashes. He can hear it as the message ends and then begins again, back around to the part he’d first caught.

He starts working the telegraph key.

Someone behind him sucks in a breath, doesn’t let it out.

Erik finishes transcribing the message.

“May I?” Coulson asks.

He nods, and he, too, is waiting with bated breath as there’s a sound of tearing paper. Has he really heard that message, and is it even relevant? Does it have anything to do with Section 8?

Has he just heard something that might be helpful to Charles?

“I’ve seen parts of this one before,” Coulson says after a moment. “We know this station.”

Not one of the missing stations, but he’s stumbled onto something the others know. It’s a start, Erik thinks. “Was there a missing station close to this one?”

“Yes,” says one of the other operators. A feminine voice, sandpapered around the edges. She sounds like she speaks in that monotone all the time, and it makes Erik wonder about her, and what she’s heard and done and witnessed during her time in the section. “The last time we heard it, it was a little bit more to the right, but they may have shifted further down.”

“Thank you,” Erik says, and he goes back to listening. He keeps going left, a tiny increment at a time, and the static swells and ebbs like irregular waves. 

Another delicate adjustment - another possible sequence of intelligible signals - and soon after he starts following the message with his telegraph key he starts “hearing” the Morse code. The dits and dahs become more meaningful; they turn into numbers inside his head.

He thinks of the parts of this message as numbers because he can’t really think of them as meaningful letters and words. He’s listening to encrypted messages; he’s not listening to what he would think of as an ordinary message, with characters arranged into patterns that he can interpret.

He sets the telegraph key into motion again.

“This isn’t one of ours - I don’t think we’ve ever heard this one before,” Coulson says from very close by. Something about his voice makes the hairs on the back of Erik’s neck stand up. “Could someone check this sequence for me, please?”

“Where on the dial am I?” Erik asks as he pushes his sunglasses up, not really listening to the rest of the instructions.

The same feminine voice from before supplies the answer, and he mutters, “Thank you,” and he tunes them out again, and keeps going.

By dint of sheer perseverance he finds two of the missing stations; he’s hunched in on himself, looking for the third, when he’s interrupted by a hand on his shoulder.

He doesn’t start, and he doesn’t tear the headphones right off, but it’s a very close-run thing. “Yes?”

“You’re doing good work,” Coulson tells him. 

“I haven’t found all of your missing stations yet. How many are there as of today?”

“Still ten; small blessings. But you must also know that you have done something remarkable: you’ve also just found an entirely new station that we’d never heard from before.”

That makes Erik take his hands off the set and the key. “The one with the 

numbers?”

“The one with what sounds like the numbers, yes,” Coulson corrects. “I really doubt that anyone who’s sitting next to a telegraph key with a message like that is sending out something so simple. I’ve put some of our best people on it. If we’re lucky, by tonight we can start sending some of the signals over to the counterintelligence teams. But we couldn’t have been that lucky without you sitting here and listening.”

Erik nods, slowly. “Lucky. We need to be even luckier.”

“I’ve faith in your abilities, Mister Lehnsherr.”

He hears footsteps moving away and he can hear the excited whispering that springs up and fades away in the man’s wake.

But the sound that dominates his thoughts, that stays with him, is the constant click and patter of Morse code: discordant, insistent, and enveloping. Mechanisms moving around him, recording dots and dashes.

Try as he might to figure out the voices speaking and the telegraph keys being used all around him, he can’t seem to come to an accurate estimate of the number of people in the room with him.

He puzzles over the implications: so many people, all with the task of listening in?

How much danger is Providence in?

Is Genosha its only enemy, or is Genosha just the most prominent of those who would see it torn down?

His thoughts loop back, easily, to Charles, and to the worry that he’s been carrying around with him. He’d slept, but fitfully, after the interrupted performance of the _Goldberg Variations_.

How much danger is Charles in, on this task of his that he has to perform without anyone to back him up?

That last question thumps down Erik’s already strained nerves and he reaches for his instruments with almost jerky movements. Responsibility and worry are the millstones hanging from his shoulders.

He might not know just how much depends on what he can hear - but it might help if he thinks about resuming the hunt with Charles’s safety in mind.

He wants Charles to come back alive.

He touches the tuning knob again.

When it stops dead under his fingers, when he’s unable to go further to the left, he takes a deep breath, and starts again. This time he goes in the other direction. Past the stations he’s found today, and towards the ones the he needs to search for.

///

When he comes back to himself, it takes him a moment to recognize his surroundings.

He knows he’s not in his quarters, and he’s not in the room where the telegraph men and women do their work, and he’s certainly nowhere near the clearing where he and Charles had been talking.

He tries to shuffle his feet and can’t really manage it. The left one has gone a little numb, and he winces behind his sunglasses for the pins and needles.

The room he’s in is small, and it smells just a little familiar. Wood and metal, both recently warmed and recently used; dust and papers and the dregs of coffee and tea both, which make him wince and shake his head in disbelief in equal measure.

He will have to remember to refuse any and all cups that the others might offer him in this particular location, politeness and attempts to be friendly be damned. The coffee smells burnt and the tea old, and just the mere thought of being forced to drink either very nearly makes him gag right here and now.

Which brings him back to the question of, where is he?

But the answer is literally at Erik’s fingertips: a little pressure, a smooth surface, and a quiet note resonates in the space around him.

The piano, he thinks dazedly. He’s in the room with the piano, which is actually the office where Charles and his team work, and that’s when he starts to remember what he’s done.

Six missing stations already found, and the new numbers station on top of that.

He remembers that Betsy had come to get him, steering him to one of the smaller mess halls. He remembers dinner, that he shoveled it down with mechanical movements, but he doesn’t remember what he actually put into his mouth.

He remembers getting into bed and then getting out of it. He remembers the locked doors between himself and the anechoic room - remembers that Jericho was not there, so he could not get into that quiet space.

So instead of in that room, he’s here, in the office, and the piano has given up the ghost of the last note he’d played.

He’s so tired; he can barely force himself back up to his feet. It’s not the first time that he’s had to rely on the loop of his cane to make sure that he’s still actually holding on to the damned thing, but the last few times that that had happened had been during his convalescence after the accident.

What had he even been playing? Slowly the song filters back into his waking memory. A tune of his own, Erik thinks, something that might have had its genesis in the rhythmic screech and cry of a train at full speed, and in the bumping and jostling of a jeep driven over rough mountain roads.

Something like running, though he actually doesn’t know yet if he means running forward or running away.

He plays a phrase, vaguely remembered from earlier. His form is sloppy, and his technique is a little too heavy-handed.

He’s tired and he needs to sleep, he thinks, and the thought makes him yawn. The piano makes a lot of noise when he tries to put it back as he’d found it.

He loses track of the number of times he stumbles as he makes his way back to his quarters, to the unlocked door and to the cold pillow, and even thinking about familiar tunes and sarabandes leaves him reeling, unable to complete the sequences that he should have known.

///

The air is thick with secrets and laughter and furtive music, and Charles looks down into his - third? Fourth? - tumbler of indifferent whiskey, trying to hide his disdain.

He really wishes there was a polite way to tell the woman on stage that her voice isn’t suited to the song she’s singing.

On any other day, he’d simply get up and get out, preferably to move somewhere he might stand a decent chance of salvaging what was left of the evening. Today, though, he’s stuck here, and he can only curse his bad luck, very quietly and very much under his breath.

Another burst of raucous laughter issues from the three tables that have been pushed together at the foot of the stage. 

Charles catalogues the group for the fourth or fifth time. Mostly males, mostly white, mostly middle-aged. The only exceptions are the woman who ordered a violently pink cocktail and then didn’t touch a drop of it, and the woman who still seems to be engrossed in the book she’s reading.

How she manages to understand anything with the dim lights and the constant roar of noise, Charles has no idea.

His objective is neither of them, but since they’re seated to either side of the man who _is_ , Charles has no intentions of ignoring them or dismissing them.

He does, however, thank his lucky stars that neither of the women is Selene. That neither of them is the woman who’d declared Erik’s life was hers for the taking. Ugly words around an ugly smile, too much teeth and too much malice and nothing at all human in her features.

He takes a deep breath, and forces the bile back down his throat, and drinks his whiskey down to the dregs.

He continues to watch the group. More specifically, he continues to watch the man who’d led them all in, with expansive gestures and a too-hearty voice.

In stark contrast to his gestures the man has a face that is pinched even when he’s laughing uproariously. His hands are constantly in motion. A wide, skull-like grin. His eyes remain dead and dark even in the flash and movement of the colored lights from the stage and from overhead.

Charles shifts, playing the absent-minded man already well into his cups, making sure that he’s still got a good view of his objective. He’s taken enough pains, and paid just a little too much money, to make sure that he’s sitting in a position where he can easily see everyone and everything - but at the same time, he’s sitting in a position where he is shrouded in shifting shadows, so no one can see his face except as a vague collection of shapes.

On top of that Charles is wearing a very basic disguise, one he doesn’t use very often, but one that’s been quite useful. A pair of lenses that hide the tell-tale blue of his eyes behind nondescript dark brown. A pea-sized amount of colored wax worked into his hair. A little concealer to cover the worst of his scars, to smooth out the lines in his face. Simplicity is key, he thinks. He only has to change a few things to change everything. 

The woman on stage finishes her song at last. 

Charles breathes a sigh of relief, and claps his hands once or twice just to be polite.

The band looks like it’s going to strike up a new tune, a handful of almost-familiar bars, but someone runs up to the stage and shakes his head several times, causing the man with the tenor saxophone to step up to his microphone. “Seems someone has a happy little announcement to make, ladies and gentlemen - ”

Charles waves at the bartender for another refill, and accepts the glass without looking at it, because the man at the head of the noisy tables has gotten to his feet.

That man takes the offered microphone and grins, like a death’s-head under the shifting lights.

“My name is Sebastian Shaw and I will be married in exactly two months,” the man says. “O happy day, o happy tidings. Please would you all drink a toast to the health of my bride, though she is not here?”

There’s a rumble in the bar as people get to their feet, enthusiastically or drunkenly or indifferently, and Charles raises his glass to his enemy, to codename ‘Hornet’.

“Cheers to the Worthingtons,” Shaw says. “And cheers to Kathryn, the love and light of my life.”

“Cheers,” Charles mutters, distracted, and thinking as fast as he can.

The last time he’d heard the name _Worthington_ , he’d been speaking to Erik.

Erik had mentioned working on a grand piano in a house that belonged to the Worthington family - a house that would become the residence of someone who was about to be married.

The pieces fall together quickly in Charles’s mind.

Everything apparently loops back to Erik, and he could almost laugh at the irony, now that he can see it clearly: he remembers Emma Frost telling Erik to listen to Hornet’s signals to find the woman he’s marrying.

Now Charles has the requested information, and he has no telegraph team of his own, and he needs to let the others know what’s going on - but he has to stay, too. He has to keep watching Shaw, and has to keep paying attention to him and to his group.

He’s torn right down the middle between hurrying back to his quarters and staying put.

He stays put. He forces himself to calm down. He orders a sandwich from the bartender and picks at the soggy crust, at the indifferent and unknown cheese.

The men at Shaw’s table laugh and tell off-color jokes until they’re reduced to incoherent slurring - until Shaw himself yawns and waves drunkenly for the bill, some three or four hours later.

Charles orders a glass of water, finishes it, and then asks for a second.

The water helps, and he’s able to stand up straight and walk away from the bar, even when his senses are all a-whirl from the combined effects of the alcohol and what he’s already learned.

A deep breath, chilled air filling his lungs with sharp edges, filling his mind with unexpected and welcome clarity.

He watches from around the corner of the building as the bartender, several men, and the two women pour Shaw and his companions into a fleet of oversized and ostentatious cars.

The city streets are almost unfamiliar as he threads a winding path back to his rented rooms. 

He watches every corner, every rooftop, every doorway. He peers into the shadows that surround him with watchful eyes. He looks over his shoulder every few steps.

His hands are almost frozen into tense fists by the time he has to wrestle with his locked door, with his curtains drawn tight against the coming morning, with the miniature telegraph key and its transmitting wires. 

He might be shaking from the aftereffects of his night, but he makes himself go through the security procedures. Being drunk is no excuse, he thinks, hazily. Erik has to be told the full story, the real connection between the man who hit him and the man they’re hunting now, and it has to be done one way or another - but it has to be done the _right_ way, the _safe_ way.

The code he has to use slips his mind from moment to moment - but he thinks he manages to hang on long enough to send his message once.

He has to remember to send it again come the morning, or when he can crawl out of bed and try to feel human again, whatever comes first.

Charles falls into an uneasy sleep, with strange sounds caroming in his swimming head: the screech of a car braking just a little too soon or a little too late. Footsteps, trying to get away. The chilling, nearly silent _thump_ of impact, metal against man.


	10. Chapter 10

Erik can hear the shouting from the end of the corridor, and he hastens forward, the beat of his cane on the floors speeding up, until the tap of it is nearly lost in the heat of the raised voices.

“Why wasn’t he told - ”

“ - operational security - ”

“Some of us work _better_ when it gets personal!”

“And some of you get killed when you take things personally. I am rather heavily prejudiced against the idea of my people dying for nothing; I should think that was the reasonable position to be taking here.”

Betsy and Jean and Sean are all in there, as is Emma Frost. And there is one more voice, one he’s not familiar with, one he can’t properly place. 

He knocks on the - door? Jamb? The wall next to the door? 

The silence that follows rings hollow in Erik’s ears.

“Is there a problem?” he asks, as neutrally as he can, into that unnatural quiet. “Perhaps I should come back later. I only came this way because Coulson told me to take a break, and I thought I’d play for a moment.”

Emma Frost’s is the first voice he hears. “Erik,” she says in her cool voice. “How goes the search?”

He shrugs in her general direction. “We haven’t lost any other stations yet, or at least we haven’t started losing them on a more permanent basis. Some of the more active stations are shifting up and down on the frequencies, but it’s getting easier to find them every time they drop out,” he reports. “On the other hand, we have also found one other new station, so there is progress being made, and I suppose that’s a good thing.”

“So you’re on break why?” Too many accented vowels: Sean. “Is today actually going well or going badly?”

“You would know,” Jean says, a little sympathetic and a little mocking. “The number of times Charles has sent you off to take a walk and calm your mind - ”

“Well, every time he does something like that I come back better. I like being sent out.”

Erik smiles to himself. Shakes his head. He sounds rueful, and also amused. “They’re changing my set,” he says. “Tuning for stations on the old set was difficult because the controls were coming loose. Coulson says the unit’s been in use since this post was established, and that I can’t work efficiently on that, and I quote, ‘rickety old rig’. They’re going to install one of the newer sets, and they’ll call me back down when they’ve got everything in order.”

“That does sound like Coulson.” 

The voice is the one that Erik doesn’t know very well. A woman’s voice, raspy with fatigue and cigarette smoke, and nearly as cool as that of the woman who must serve as Coulson’s right hand. The unknown woman’s consonants are much harder, though, and much more clipped.

He tilts his head in the woman’s direction and says, “Have we met?”

“Not precisely, Mister Lehnsherr,” is the response. “I’m Maria Hill, head of Section 8’s cryptography division.” 

He holds his hand out to her, and she shakes it. A hard grip and callused fingers. It makes him wonder what she used to do, and why she became a codebreaker. 

“So you’re the genius they hired to listen in on Genosha,” she says, briskly. “We’re thankful for the extra sources of intelligence. It makes life so much easier when there’s more data to look at, though it does mean extra hours of work, since each new station is encrypted differently.”

Emma Frost cuts in before Erik can respond. “Your section is doing quite excellently, Maria; we’ve never had this much insider information before.”

“And so to return to the matter at hand: I still think it wouldn’t be a good idea to tell him about the message we just deciphered.”

“He’s mentioned directly in it,” Emma Frost says. 

“What are you talking about?” Erik asks, at last. “Or _who_?”

Whisper of movement next to him. His hand brushes against a long fall of wavy hair. “It’s me,” Jean says. “And we’re talking about you.”

“Me? Why? Have I done something?”

“You haven’t done anything, but Charles has,” Emma Frost says. “He sent us a message last night, and the same one this morning, and the message was about something that concerned you.”

“And I gather you’re talking about whether or not I should receive that message at all,” Erik says.

“Some people think you might go and do something stupid,” Betsy says.

“If I wasn’t told I might be affected and I might not be. But it’d be a distraction, if I didn’t know, and I should think no one here can afford one of those right now. So I’d rather hear it and make decisions afterwards, thank you.”

“That is a remarkably lucid line of reasoning,” Emma Frost murmurs. “Very well then. My decision is made. Maria, the message, please.”

Erik hears Maria groan, mostly under her breath. “On your own heads be it.” She clears her throat. There’s a sound of papers being riffled. “Message received from Charles Xavier,” she says. “The decrypted text reads: _Time to let Erik know that codename ‘Hornet’ and Sebastian Shaw are one and the same. Wedding ceremony to take place in two months. The intended bride is Kathryn Worthington. Surveillance to continue as ordered._ Message ends.”

There’s a ringing in his ears, completely unexpected.

From somewhere nearby, Sean swears, and Betsy reprimands him for his language, but all Erik hears is: “Make him sit down before he falls down!”

He drops, suddenly, and he makes contact with the piano bench and he takes one deep breath after another.

Shuffling sounds.

Erik’s mind supplies him with an unfortunate memory: the crash of shattering glass, the jolting crunch of impact. Blood in his mouth and on his hands and the scratch of broken gravel against his cheek.

That was when everything went dark for him - but he can still remember the last memory, the last face he’d ever seen. The face of Sebastian Shaw.

The face, apparently, of codename ‘Hornet’.

He swallows, and it’s loud in the silence that rings between his ears, the silence in which he slogs past the first set of names in the message from Charles - from _Charles_ , he thinks, hanging on to the name - to arrive at the second.

_The intended bride is Kathryn Worthington._

“Worthington,” he says, slowly, carefully, little caring if anyone’s actually listening to him at this point. “I know a Worthington. Warren Worthington III. He hired me to tune a grand piano. I didn’t finish the job because Section 8 came looking for me.”

“We know that name, too,” Jean tells him. “Head of his family’s various business dealings and enterprises. Also a philanthropist and, in his spare time, a man about town. The gossip rags talk about him all the time, but lately his name has been overshadowed by that of his mother’s.”

“Do you know what his mother’s name is? I never asked,” Erik says, shaking his head. “Not even when we talked about the reason why I was tuning the piano. All I was told was that he wanted her to be able to use it when she came back from her honeymoon.”

“I do know what his mother’s name is - and you’ve just heard it. We all just did.” Jean sighs softly. The sound seems to travel in Erik’s direction, until it stops with her hand on his shoulder. “Warren Worthington III’s mother’s name is Kathryn. Kathryn Worthington.”

“Soon to be Kathryn Shaw,” Maria mutters. “And when that happens - when that happens, Providence is fucked.”

“Language, Maria,” Emma Frost says, but there’s nothing at all disapproving in her voice.

“I’ll talk however I want to - and you and I both know it’s the only thing I can say, Emma. We’ll all be fucked and likely worse. I hope you’re ready for that.”

“I am _not_. I will fight it. I am going to do everything in my power to make sure that does not happen.” There’s a sound like heeled shoes striking the floor, and as with Jean earlier, these sounds approach Erik, making him look up, making him attempt to sit up straight. “I should have told you these things earlier, Erik,” Emma Frost says. “I did not want you distracted by thoughts of vengeance.”

“A little bit too late for that now,” Erik tells her. He clenches his hands into fists. He’s lucky he trimmed his nails, just, or he’d be drawing blood from his palms. 

“I agree. And so if you will let me direct that drive for vengeance - ”

“You’ll have to convince me,” Erik says, little caring that he’s interrupting.

“I know,” she says. “And I’m going to start right now. Betsy, Sean, please get the codename ‘Hornet’ file. Or should I say, the Shaw file. All of it.”

“Two boxes’ worth,” Maria adds. “This is going to take a while. I’d better go and talk to Coulson.”

“Send a message to Charles, while you’re at it, if you please,” he hears Emma Frost say. “Tell him I lose, he was right, and I’m getting him some help.”

“What kind of help?” Erik asks. The worry flutters, huge wings trapped painfully beneath his ribs, beating in a desperate bid to escape.

“Help,” Emma Frost says, “as in _you_.”

He draws in a sharp breath.

“A chance for vengeance, Erik, that’s what I’m offering you,” she continues. “Are you interested?”

“I’m listening,” Erik says.

///

He’s surrounded by showy flowers, by a riot of bright colors, and every time he breathes he takes in their powerful scents.

Charles shakes his head and moves on to the next seller in the row. He politely brushes past offers of roses and chrysanthemums and irises.

He’s not looking for flowers for a lover or for a beloved - he’s looking for flowers for the bereaved, but he can’t tell anyone that.

He’s supposed to be conducting surveillance, but this is also a task that needs doing, no matter how much of a risk it might be.

The vibrant colors all around him fade when he thinks of the anguish in Erik’s voice, in Erik’s face, when Section 8 had buried Janos Quested. A friend to those within the section, and a friend to Erik.

It’s a small world after all, Charles thinks, the more so when he thinks about the circle that’s just been closed. Another circle closing in on Erik.

Charles clenches his fists, and shakes the grim thoughts away - and that’s when he catches a sweet melancholy scent, something subtle and strange and sad.

“Hello,” says an old woman in a black dress and a bright pink apron. “Looking for something, sir?”

He nods, and he looks at her table, until his gaze lands on three tall white flowers on rich green stems, six graceful petals in a familiar trumpet-shaped configuration. “What are those called?” he asks, politely.

“Easter lilies,” is the reply. “They’re beautiful, aren’t they?”

“They certainly are.” He takes one of the lilies, looks carefully into the heart of it - deep green lines in the surrounding white, and the unmistakable bright yellow of the pollen, which he avoids touching. “I think I’ll take them. How much for the three?”

“Good choice,” the old woman says. “I’ll let you have them for a good price. Can’t let them go to waste, you see. Going to see someone special?”

For some reason Charles’s thoughts flicker back to Erik, but he quashes the thought, buries it down deep. “I - you can say that.”

The old woman wraps the lilies up in a length of cream-colored ribbon before handing them over to Charles; he thanks her, heads for the street corner, consults the map of the city that he keeps in his head.

He wonders if he isn’t actually threading the steps that Erik might have taken in his travels around this city, going to visit people and pianos.

Eventually he looks up to find himself on a street full of shabby-looking apartment buildings, some old and weathered enough to look like they’re leaning upon each other. Faded and worn red stucco; balconies hung with washing; the sounds of dogs barking and children shouting and men and women going about their daily lives.

He remembers the name that Erik had said - the name of his friend, the name of the person whom Janos has left behind.

He turns in at one of the buildings. The front desk is empty and falling into disrepair, as are the cubbyholes for the residents’ mail. He pauses here, eyes flicking rapidly through the jumble of names, no semblance of order that he can see - and then he sees it: _Angel Quested_.

She lives on the fourth floor. Charles makes his way up a series of staircases, and his steps are loud in the relative hush of this part of the building, his shoes clicking against the metal safety caps on each step. Twice he steps aside to allow others to come up or down: once to let a boy and his oversized dog run downstairs, and once to let an old man with a full basket of fruits pass.

On the fourth floor all of the doors are closed and locked. He finds Angel Quested’s residence without any trouble; the doormat looks like it’s been recently brushed clean, and its bright blue is a welcome splash of color on the plain wooden-and-cream floor.

He hesitates outside the door. Doesn’t knock. He doesn’t know if there’s anyone home.

After a moment he pulls a pen and a piece of paper from his pockets, and he prints the following words in block letters: _With deepest sympathies - from the people who worked with J._

He wants to say more, and knows he can’t, and also knows that sharing this information will hurt its intended recipient - but so will saying nothing.

He tucks the note into the midst of the three lilies, and hangs the whole thing from the doorknob by the loops in the ribbon.

Footsteps on the staircase - he looks up and down the corridor, watches the oncoming shadows, and quickly hurries away towards the other end of the floor.

When he gains the opposite stairwell he risks a look over his shoulder.

There are two young women standing in front of the door that he’s just left. Hands clasped tightly together. They’re dressed more or less identically: dark green blouses, long black skirts, boxy gray jackets. The outfits have the feel of a uniform. The one with the pale blonde hair wears it in a short bob, but it’s the one with the dark hair in the haphazard bun that catches Charles’s attention. 

He’s seen those features before. Something about her nose, and the curve of her jaw.

He turns away as soon as she takes the lilies from the doorknob, and he clatters down the stairs, and hurries away from the apartment building.

He doesn’t look back - he doesn’t have time - he glances at his watch and realizes he’s already late for his appointment.

From a quiet quarter of the city to one of its busiest, and from empty sidewalks to crowded ones. He ducks and weaves around human traffic, human interactions. He catches snippets of conversation and extremely loud music. He wipes the sweat from his streaming brow, and breathes a sigh of relief when he hurries into the hotel where he and Moira usually meet.

Nearly every chair in the tea room is taken, and he weaves around the bustling waitresses as they offer fresh cups and sugar cubes and crustless cucumber sandwiches - and when he gets to his table he stands there mute for a long moment.

“Cat got your tongue?” Moira inquires sweetly. “And you’re late. Of all the things! I would never have expected you to be late to one of our meetings!”

“I had pressing matters to attend to,” he says, and he even manages to bow over Moira’s offered hand, before dropping heavily into his seat and leaning in to hiss, “ _What is going on here?_ ”

“Hello, Charles,” says the man already sitting at Moira’s table, wearing a passable suit that has lint on the shoulder seams, and a pair of by-now-familiar sunglasses. “I am sorry it took a few days for me to get here. It was a job and a half to get through the files we were given. We had to fend off a nest of hornets in the process; they’d made their home in all that paper.” Innocuous words, faintly smilingly delivered.

“I - see,” Charles says, slowly, as if coming out of a daze.

“I hope you’re doing well.”

“I am making ends meet.” Charles takes a deep breath, and touches the man’s wrist. “Hello, Erik.”

“Good, you two know each other,” Moira cuts in briskly. “That saves me a little time. We can talk about more pressing matters.”

He narrows his eyes at her, then. “Starting with - don’t I deserve an explanation for what’s going on?”

“Explanation? Why, I thought you’d be able to figure it out for yourself. _Someone_ ,” and she waves her spoon in the air, negligently, “made a mistake and now they’re trying to correct it.”

“You should have told me, Charles,” Erik says gently. Blue-figured porcelain held carefully in that hand. “I know, now. I was asked to remember quite a lot of information about your - ahem - current tasks.”

Charles blinks, takes that in, and begins to smile. He reaches for Erik’s free hand and lays his fingertips briefly over the other man’s pulse. It makes Erik smile again. “You were sent here to help me?”

“Yes, and I understand there are quite a few things to be keeping an ear out for.”

“You can say that again,” Charles says, “but first let me eat, and I’ll let you eat, and when we are done refreshing ourselves we can adjourn to someplace more congenial to that kind of conversation.”

“That’s a really good idea,” Moira says. “And I hope you will excuse me if I must tag along. Our friend here needs some protection.”

Erik snorts, still smiling. “I’d be in a little trouble if I were left alone, I was told.”

Charles makes a face, and says, “Yes, I remember.” He helps himself to a small sandwich, dusts the crumbs from his hands, pours more tea, serves himself some lemon ice. “As far as I know, at present none of those people who were looking for you are here.”

“That’s good to hear,” Erik says. “Someone please pass the - sweet things?”

Moira laughs softly. “I hope you like petits fours, Erik.”

“My mother could always bake better things - I still remember the bread she made every week - but these’ll do in a pinch.”

Charles laughs, and watches the smile grow on Erik’s face, and silently transfers his own share of the tartlets to Erik’s plate, little caring about the knowing light that suddenly appears in Moira’s eyes.

///

“Welcome, gentlemen, to my humble abode - Erik, watch your feet, there’s a step down from the door,” Moira says, and her voice fades, acquires a different echo, as she moves away from him.

Erik finds the indicated step, and his feet move from scuffed tile, over an inch of stone, and then on to something like polished wood, and he shuffles his shoes and listens attentively to what the reflected sound tells him about the room.

With Charles brushing past him with a polite murmur, the room seems to be filled with human presence, though Erik can also smell the dust that lingers in the corners. The close air is redolent with the wooden vanilla scent of paper, and he thinks of reports or books or file folders, such as the ones he’d spent the last few days trying to make sense of.

Thanks to the file on Sebastian Shaw he now knows the precise differences in the voices of Betsy and Jean and Sean - and he also now knows more about Coulson’s right-hand woman. Her name is Melinda. She lost her family when a Genoshan sleeper agent set her entire neighborhood aflame eight or nine years ago - she was the only survivor from her building, and had become a minor _cause-célèbre_ \- has been working for Section 8 in various capacities, in the field and at the post, since.

His musings are cut short when Moira clears her throat. 

That sound echoes, too, and it makes him think that the room sounds rather small, with a high ceiling as if to compensate for its size, and he can hear her footsteps as well as Charles’s movements, as if from rather close by, though when he stretches out his hand he encounters only empty air.

She sounds oddly subdued when she speaks: “You won’t mind working with someone else’s gear?”

“I’ll be very careful with it,” Erik says, just as quietly. “I’ll make sure it’ll still be in good condition for when they get back.”

“They’re - not coming back. Erik, I’m sorry, did they tell you who my telegraph man was?”

“No,” Erik says, and something about her words makes her brace himself. “Who was it?”

“It was Janos Quested.”

Erik swallows, hard, against the lump in his throat. “Then I’ll do my best to be as good as he was,” he tells her. “Where is the set?”

It’s Charles who answers him. “Here,” he says, “follow my voice, Erik.”

Erik turns right, and heads in Charles’s general direction. The cane guides him around a coffee table and a - three-legged stool? Ottoman? - and then he finds a sturdy-seeming wooden table, and the chair that Charles is sitting in. “Is this you, Charles?”

“Yes, you’ve found me,” is Charles’s reply. Something scrapes along the floor and Charles’s voice changes position. “Do you want to sit down?”

“Yes, please.” Erik feels along the back of the chair, finds a protruding post, hangs the loop of his cane from that. He smoothes the back of his hand over the seat before dropping into it.

The table, when he faces it, is larger than the desk he’d worked at in Section 8. The radio receiver and the telegraphy set-up take up most of one end, while the other is occupied with piles of folders and hardbound books.

His fingertips come away a little dusty when he reaches for the listening equipment. 

“Sorry about the mess,” Moira says from somewhere behind him.

Erik shakes his head, and turns the set on. Tunes in to one of the Section 8 stations, to the specific one that he has to use today. It takes him a moment to put together the message he wants to send; he thinks about the encryption that Jean and Sean had drilled into him before he left the Section 8 post in the middle of the night, two or perhaps three days ago.

He reaches for the telegraph key. The first sequence, checking to see if the line to the listening station is clear: _City here. From M._

The response: _Read you loud and clear, M._

There’s something familiar about that fist, about the concise strokes and the precision of the message, and he leans in, sends his question first, instead of the agreed-upon message. _Is that you, Y?_

 _Yes, it’s me,_ is the answer, after he works through the encryption. He thinks about Melinda, always ready with the information that he needs, sometimes even before he needs it. It makes him pause, nod, and then he turns in what he thinks must be Charles’s direction. “Have you ever worked in the field with Melinda?” he asks in a low voice.

“I have,” Charles says. He sounds a little bit awed. “She taught me a few of her tricks. She was a damn good fighter, when it had to come to that. And when it comes to guns only Emma Frost could do better than she did. I haven’t spoken to her in quite a while. How is she?”

“Doing well,” Erik says. “She’s just as good a telegraph operator as any three or four of the rest of us put together.”

“I completely agree.” Charles clears his throat. “Are you speaking with her now?”

“Yes.”

“If there’s time, please give her my regards.”

“And mine,” Moira adds from behind Erik. Then: “Charles, here are some of the other dispatches from this morning - ”

Erik nods, tunes them both out, focuses on the telegraph key again. For a moment he pauses over identifying the others on this active connection, and he holds his breath as he continues to transmit, trusting the encryption because he must. _CX and MCT send their regards._

_And give them mine. Tell them we are listening for them, to keep them safe._

_I will. Is there anything to share with them?_

_None at the moment. Do you have anything to report?_

_Everything is all right on this end,_ Erik sends, smiling.

_Good. Go and do your work, and good luck._

_Good luck to you too. Give P my regards._

The last message is quick, and after that the channel falls silent. _Will do._

He raises his head. The other two are still speaking quietly behind him. “Is there anything you need me to listen to?”

A pause, and then Moira answers. “We’ll probably need to check the stations around midnight, or a little after that.”

“All right,” Erik says. “Then I’ll go and make myself useful. Moira, where is your kitchen, and what do you have in the pantry?”

“...You cook?” She sounds surprised, and he doesn’t know why.

He says, instead, “Charles? Didn’t I offer to cook for you, or at least prepare something for you?”

“Yes, you did,” is the prompt reply. “Yes, he can,” he adds, presumably in Moira’s direction. 

Erik smiles, and gets carefully to his feet, and picks his cane up once again. “Might I impose on one of you to lead me to the kitchen and help me get acquainted with it? It won’t take more than a few minutes. You will want something to eat if you’re planning to spend the night working; I’ll be more than happy to provide that for you.”

“I - all right,” Moira says. Brisk footsteps. “But I’m afraid there’s not much that’s actually fresh. Eggs, some cheese, some bread - I hope you can still use it - and I think we might still have something from the delicatessen around the corner. Tomatoes, some pasta. Garlic and onions and - oh, not this, the oranges have rotted. Sorry about that.”

“The kitchen, please?”

“Of course.”

He puts out a hand and grasps the top of her shoulder. It’s easy to follow her; there’s not much ground to cover, bearing out his earlier thought of small quarters. He can’t imagine sharing this space with up to three others, yet Moira couldn’t have been here by herself. Janos had worked here, after all.

“Oh,” Moira says, suddenly.

Erik lets her go, feels around with that freed hand, and he encounters a round dining table, cracked a little around the edges. He doesn’t pay any attention to the dust that he picks up on his fingertips.

He finds a wooden bowl on top of the table, and brushes against Moira’s hand when he reaches into it. Three or four twists of rough paper. He puts his cane down on the table and takes one of the packages, opens it with both hands. A warm, unexpected fragrance fills his senses.

Cracked skin beneath his fingertips, and sweet grit. He raises the package to his nose and takes a deep breath.

“Figs,” Moira says. “It must have been Janos who brought them back here - I wonder where he found them.” Now she sounds sad. “I didn’t even know he’d bought some.”

“Would you rather I didn’t use them?” Erik asks, as gently as he can.

“No, no, I’d like you to, if you can - what are you planning to make?”

“That depends on the bread.” 

“Well, let’s check.” Her words return to their customary briskness, but he can still hear the echoes of sorrow in her footsteps, and he turns away from her, gives her a little privacy. 

He steps more or less right into the kitchen counter; he shrugs the slight shock of impact off, and feels along it for supplies. A rack full of dishes: he counts three of similar size and piles them into a neat stack at his left hand. Next to the rack, three jars, but he passes them over in favor of two small containers, familiar shapes, with holes in the lids. He picks them up, weighs them in his hands, takes a cautious sniff from the top of the heavier one. It’s all he can do to avoid sneezing. Pepper, then, and he puts that shaker next to the plates he’s gathered. He shakes the other container into his palm, dips in a fingertip to taste. He’s found the salt.

He throws the excess over his left shoulder, and moves on - he finds a flat tray, divided into compartments. It’s full of cutlery, forks and several sizes of spoon and other unfamiliar shapes. 

“Knife block,” he mutters to himself. The scent of the figs is an unexpected distraction, the good kind. 

There’s a presence next to him, suddenly, and he puts out his hand, comes into contact with the familiar shape of a man’s wrist. “Charles,” he says.

“Kitchen knives,” Charles replies, and guides him toward a sturdy, blockish shape of tight-grained wood. “Here.”

“Thank you.” Erik feels around for the biggest knife, and draws it. He tests the edge on the nail of his thumb, and nods in satisfaction. It’s not as sharp as he likes his knives to be, but it’ll do. Perhaps as he continues to explore the kitchen he’ll find a honing steel. For now, he contents himself with looking for a table knife.

“What else do you need?”

Erik puts the big knife down on the counter, carefully, with its cutting edge turned away from the others. “I need to find the refrigerator.”

A quiet chuckle. “That shouldn’t be too difficult, then. I’m standing right next to it.”

Erik grins in the direction of Charles’s voice, and steps carefully past him. A welcome blast of cold air when he opens the door. “What’s in here?”

He actually feels it when Charles turns around, just before he crowds in next to him. “This must be the stuff from the delicatessen,” he says, and adds, “Hold out your hand.”

Erik does. A flat package, thin crinkled plastic. “What’s this?”

“Prosciutto, perhaps?”

“Good, then all I need’s the cheese and we can get started.”

“Cream cheese with some herbs and garlic mixed in,” Charles reports.

Erik nods, takes that container from him as well - a squared-off tub, satisfyingly heavy in his hand.

“I found the bread, and I think it’s still edible,” Moira says.

“Please put it with the plates and the knives and the salt and pepper, and then back to your planning you go,” Erik tells the others. “I’ll come and bring you the sandwiches when they’re done.”

“And we’ll fill you in,” Charles says. He is still talking as he draws away: “ - as I was saying, we have to find the others; the report says - ”

Erik likes making sandwiches, likes the way he can lose himself in the easy movements. It’s a task that reminds him of his mother: he remembers stealing bites from the sandwiches she would make for his father’s lunch, and he remembers getting breadcrumbs on the piano at his teacher’s house, alternating between eating and picking at melodies. 

Here and now: brioche buns, filling his nose with the sweet waft of butter and eggs as he cuts each of them into horizontal halves. Against that the cheese smells sharp and bright, a more than welcome contrast, and he takes a deep breath of it, enjoying the idea of it, and looking forward to actually putting it into his mouth.

He turns his attention to the prosciutto next, carefully peeling back the packaging. He thinks of pepper, pungent and heady, and he sets the salt and pepper shakers aside. 

He puts a thin shaving of meat onto his tongue and chews, contemplatively, and he can’t help but lick his lips afterwards. Rich and delicious and almost too savory, melting away into a flavorful smear across his teeth, and if he sighs and shakes his head he’s fairly sure that there’s no one here to notice.

He layers the prosciutto thickly onto the waiting sandwiches.

Lastly, there’re the figs to consider. Erik sobers, spares a moment to think about his friend. He says “Thank you” into the quiet of the kitchen, then takes up the large knife and cuts the figs into thin, wrinkled discs, his hands moving in concert with the sharp blade that sings softly with each stroke. He scatters the sliced figs over the laden brioches.

And then there’s nothing left to do but top off the sandwiches and slice them onto the plates. He balances the plates carefully on his forearms, picks up his cane, and makes his way back to the others.

The quiet buzz of intent conversation is gone, and in its place is a determined scratching, which starts and stops and is mixed in with the humming sounds of a Charles lost in thought.

“Where’s Moira?” Erik asks as he feels around for the same chair in which he’d been sitting earlier, the one set up at the radio.

The scratching continues for a moment; when Charles speaks he sounds distracted. “Moira got a message from - someone - and she had to step out. I don’t know when she’ll be coming back.”

“I see,” Erik says. “So what are you doing?”

“Making myself useful by annotating some of her reports.”

“There are sandwiches ready for when you feel like eating.”

A pause in the scratching. A hand near his. “Thank you,” Charles says, warmth in his voice.

Erik shrugs, pushes his own plate aside, and turns to the radio. He has to adjust the headphones so that they’ll fit correctly on his ears. Static fills his ears, like the sound of waiting, and he reaches for the tuning knob - but before he can turn the machine on Charles clears his throat behind him, and says his name: “Erik.”

He keeps the headphones on, but he turns around in the chair. He has to be mindful of his movements, however, or he’ll get tangled in the cords, and he’s had that happen to him back at the Section 8 post too many times to count already. It was only funny the first five or six times. He would rather listen to the others swearing profusely when it happened to them, a continual bane to their listening work. “Yes?”

He can hear Charles as he actually shuffles his feet; he can hear something unhappy in the man’s voice when he speaks: “I wanted Emma to tell you right when you signed up with us, you know.”

“Are we talking about codename ‘Hornet’ now? Or should we just call him Sebastian Shaw and make it easier on ourselves, since we now know we’re talking about the same person?” Erik asks, tilting his head in the direction of Charles’s voice.

A rueful sigh. “We can call him Shaw, that’s fine with me. Or we can call him all manner of obscene things if that’ll make you feel better.”

Erik almost, almost considers taking him up on that offer; but he shakes that thought away and shifts on his chair instead, trying to get comfortable. For some reason he can’t - something about the proportions of the chair is wrong, or perhaps that’s just Erik’s imagination, since he hadn’t had any problems when he was exchanging messages with Melinda.

He takes off the headphones and sets them aside; he abandons that chair to sit next to Charles. 

Charles is shuffling his papers around, and Erik can hear the tap of the bundle being leveled against the tabletop.

He reaches out, and his fingertips brush against the pen that Charles must have been using. It’s still warm from the other man’s hand. The barrel’s been nicked and scratched, many times over; there are initials at the end. “B X?” he asks.

“Brian Xavier,” Charles says. “That pen belonged to my father.”

“I heard you writing with it. I wonder what your handwriting looks like,” Erik says. “I’m afraid that when I could see, when I started composing my own tunes, my manuscripts were almost always a disaster. Not even my friends could always understand what I was writing.”

He gets a too-quiet chuckle for that. “Then my handwriting’s not much better. The only reason Jean can read my chickenscratch is because we’ve known each other for a while now. She has to translate what I write for the others.”

“And Emma Frost?”

“She can’t read my dispatches either, not when I’m not transmitting in Morse code.”

Erik steeples his hands under his chin, and listens to the strained edge in Charles’s breathing. “Tell me about you and Section 8.”

“I thought we were talking about Shaw?”

“You’ll wind up getting there, won’t you?”

A sigh, and it sounds determined. “I see. You’re right, we’ll end up with him, and then we’ll get on to you.”

When Erik hums, trying to be encouraging, he finds himself falling into the first few bars of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.

“Has anyone told you,” Charles says after a startled moment, “that you have a fair singing voice?”

“Only a fair one, yes,” Erik says, smiling in his direction. “Don’t ask me to keep going. I’ll fall apart if I go any further.” He thinks about what he’s just done, and shakes his head in consternation. “I don’t know why I did that. Excuse me.”

“I wonder what it would sound like if I listened to you play that whole thing.”

“I would like to play it for you. I only hope I can still get through the third movement in one piece.” Erik shakes his head, thinking of the terrifying and thrilling complexity of the arpeggios, the ferocity needed to power through the storm of emotions and - the more demanding part - share it with an audience. 

“Maybe when we get back to the post,” Charles says, contemplatively.

“Or if we find a better piano.” Erik shrugs, one-shouldered. 

After a pause, he says, “Story, Charles.”

“I really thought I could get away from that,” is the response, but he sounds like he’s making a joke, so Erik doesn’t say anything, just waits patiently.

Eventually Charles does start talking, in fits and starts. “It’s a ridiculous story, truth be told, and one that won’t take that long to tell, which I suppose might be a good thing. I’ve always been interested in biology, in genetics in particular - it was easy for me to understand the flow of information in the genes, how it was passed down from one generation to another, open to change and to mutation, capable of responding to its environment. I couldn’t get enough of it; I honestly wanted to read every book I could find. Eventually I was encouraged to concentrate on the topic when it was time to go to university, and fortunately, by then the schools were already beating a path to my door. I could have gone anywhere in the world I wanted - I could have left Providence for good.”

Erik raises an eyebrow at the somber note in Charles’s narration. “Did you want to?”

“I did,” is the response. “I thought for a long time that university would be how I got away from here.”

“Why did you want to leave?”

“My family. Most of it. Or what was left of it.”

Erik taps his way over the tabletop, searching for Charles’s pen. “And this? Something that belonged to someone in your family?”

“My father died long before I went to university. Afterwards, relations with my mother and the men she took up with were - strained.”

“I see,” Erik says, though he doesn’t understand. 

He doesn’t want to hear that pain in Charles’s voice, though, so he steers the conversation back to the original topic: “So you stayed here, but where did you go?”

Charles’s chuckle still sounds a little cracked around the edges. “Parker Institute,” he says.

Erik snorts quietly in understanding. “Should we be rivals? I spent a term at St John’s.” 

“I know. Funny how things turn out,” Charles says. “Anyway. I got my undergraduate degree, and I was in my second or third year of post-grad when I got completely sidetracked into sociobiology - the idea that social behavior is a product of evolution - and I found myself delving into the complexities of human behavior, since all I had to do to observe it was look up from my books. I put out a few papers, I didn’t have anything new or profound to say, but that was pretty much the point where Section 8 became interested in my work.”

“What could a biologist, or a geneticist, in your case, help an intelligence agency with?” Erik asks.

“That was the first question I asked Emma Frost when I finally got around to meeting her.”

“And what did she tell you?”

There’s a pause, and the sounds of someone eating, and Erik laughs softly and starts in on his own sandwich. Bread and cheese and prosciutto and figs, and a rich depth of savory tastes on his tongue. He chews contemplatively, and takes another bite.

He can hear it, too, when Charles swallows and swears, softly. “That’s really good, Erik,” he says, after what sounds like a reverent pause. “I have to tell myself to eat slowly and make it last, and not just wolf it all down.”

“Maybe you should. I think there’s enough for a few more sandwiches,” Erik says. “I don’t mind making more.”

“No, no, it’ll be too distracting,” Charles says with a quiet chuckle. “But really, thank you.” 

“You’re welcome,” Erik says, and he firmly doesn’t think any further about the implications of _It’ll be too distracting_ \- especially not when those words are coming from Charles’s mouth. “What did Emma Frost tell you?”

“Well, she talked about ridiculous things at first, like being able to mathematically predict individual human patterns of behavior,” Charles says. “I told her she’d gotten it wrong. It makes more sense to talk about the patterns of behavior exhibited by _groups_ of people. We went on from there, and I was about to kick her out of the laboratory, when she made me an offer.”

“Which was?” Erik knows he’s leaning forward in his seat.

“Help her build a team of people who understood how people thought and acted - and more importantly, how they _reacted_ to their worlds, to their circumstances.”

“Are you going to kick me out if I tell you that makes some sense?”

“Of course not,” Charles says with another small laugh. “Because that was the point where I stopped to think about what she was trying to say. More fool me.”

Erik laughs, too. “How did intelligence and counterintelligence come into it?”

“In a very roundabout way. She started talking about the patterns of behavior exhibited by those who were satisfied with who and what they were, and then about those who were malcontent, and at some point I got drawn in, and started to correct her, and halfway through my rather long-winded analysis she interrupted and asked me if I was interested in working for her intelligence group. She said she needed someone who could think carefully and scientifically about these things, someone who could bring both logic and experience to bear on a given situation.”

“I think I understood most of that,” Erik says, “but at this point you’re still talking about analysis, about working at a desk, am I correct?”

“Yes. I left Parker, told my research supervisors I might come back to write my dissertation, but - well, it’s been a while. Section 8 put me through an orientation and when I passed a rather different battery of tests from the one they gave you, I got a desk job.”

“So how on earth did you find yourself out in the field?”

He has to wait for Charles’s response, because the man is working through another bite of sandwich. “Good question. Easily answered, however. You’ve noticed we tend to work in teams?”

Erik nods, and waves his hand in a small circle. “This is where Moira’s team works, right? And when I met you, Betsy was backing you up and then I met the others.”

“Right. It only makes sense - safety in numbers, as well as additional expertise available to draw upon should it be needed. Well, they sent me off to one of those teams, though we were in the suburbs down south instead of here in the center of the city. Our task was to watch a group of people who had been identified as suspects in a series of abductions. Family members of people who worked in the government. We immediately suspected that the abductors were looking for some kind of leverage against their actual targets.”

“And?”

“One of the kidnappings went pear-shaped,” Charles says. Once again his voice is quiet and somber and subdued. “We had a right good screaming argument among ourselves - intervene or wait for Emma Frost to send the experts in? Eventually we decided to pretend we were a democracy. We put it to a vote. There were five of us and I was the tiebreaker. 

“I’m a little bit ashamed to tell you that I was on the fence until the very last moment, when we received information about what they were doing to the last person they’d taken - a little boy, no older than ten.

“I didn’t want to think about him crying for his mother and father, and I said so - and that’s how we found ourselves hurtling through the night, on the most haphazard and impromptu rescue mission that Section 8 people ever organized. Also the most idiotic, of course, because what did any of us know? I wasn’t even sure I could trust myself with the gun they gave me to carry.”

Erik takes a deep breath, enthralled. “Did you succeed?”

“Yes and no. None of us should have come back alive. But luck looks after fools and drunks and little children, and we were certainly fools riding to the rescue of a child. We got the little boy. We captured one of the kidnappers and when his companions started shooting at us we at least managed to shoot back.

“But they got one of us in the process. On the way back, he died in my arms.”

Charles’s voice falls to almost silence at the end, and Erik reaches out for his hand, grasps it tightly.

Charles squeezes back, but only for a moment; and he pulls his hand away, after. 

“We deserved every single word of the reprimand we got. We should have been punished further. Instead, the very same Emma Frost who’d been chewing us out until then turned right around and gave us citations for bravery. And with her words still ringing in my ears I went to my first Section 8 funeral.”

“I’m sorry, Charles,” Erik says. He can hear the hollowness in his own words. 

“You wanted to know why I’m in the field, Erik,” Charles says. “The answer is, because of that night, when I said we should rescue a child, when I held my friend and watched helplessly as he bled out. That’s why.”

They sit in silence for a moment, and Erik listens to the erratic ebb and flow of Charles’s breathing, listens to his movements. Charles might be rubbing his hands over his face if the rasp of skin on skin is anything to go by, and Erik thinks he almost regrets asking Charles about these things.

“I’m not done yet,” Charles says after a moment. “We haven’t quite made it to Shaw, and you did ask me about him. But - I also think that you might have a story to tell me.”

Erik nods. “Betsy said your team has a dossier on me.”

“We do, but I wanted to hear it from you.”

“Fair enough.” Erik hears that night again, tastes the metal of it on his tongue. His senses conspire to make him relive it, unnecessarily vivid. Just like the music from that night. It pulls at him, inexorable, irresistible. He thinks it must be fighting to get out of his mind, out into the world again, through his fingertips dancing over black and white keys.

He sits up straight, and puts his fingertips onto the edge of the table between him and Charles, though there’s a slight problem, because the table is a stretched-out oval shape. He imagines that the keys on a piano shaped so irregularly would be like slices of pie: triangular, or perhaps trapezoidal, with the nearest side a gentle and strange curve.

“Erik?” he hears Charles ask.

“When I think about that night,” Erik says, “the first thing I remember is Chopin, and the last is Shaw.”

“Why?”

Before he answers Erik runs his hands up and down an imaginary series of scales. The piano in his mind almost sounds like his dream of the perfect piano, beautifully tuned. The notes run together, lush and startling. His hands keep moving, and he sways into the rhythm - and then he swings into the music.

“Chopin?” Charles asks, as if from very far away. 

“Yes,” Erik says, slowly. “I don’t know if you know the Minute Waltz.” The accent is on the second syllable, _mee-NYOOT_. “Or perhaps you know it by its other name: _Valse du petit chien_.”

“The ‘Puppy Waltz’?”

Erik plays the last notes with a flourish, but he’s somber when he nods. “Yes. Chopin. I was rehearsing for a charity concert. That day there’d been a sense of festivity and hope in the auditorium - we’d just all been told that all of the seats had sold out. Which meant that we could give that much more to our intended recipients - mostly organizations having to do with child and adult literacy, continuing education, those kinds of things.

“There were four of us on the playbill. We had all chosen our pieces ourselves. I was to play all of the _Trois Valses_. You couldn’t exactly call those pieces long, or monumental - but they’re important all the same, because they’re all so very different.” 

“I see,” Charles says.

“I won’t lie to you, Charles,” Erik murmurs, playing a random sequence of notes to himself on the tabletop. He wishes the other man could hear what he’s hearing: the oddly harmonious mix of melancholia and dancing feet in the second of the three waltzes. “I wasn’t at my best that night, and that night was not a good time to be doing so badly, because there was an audience.” 

He looks up, and he sees light glittering from a tray full of champagne flutes.

He remembers shaking his head when he was offered a drink.

“The concert’s organizers were there. Some of them had brought guests. I was familiar with many of them. I’d met them before, or we had been introduced after other concerts, or they had been working with the other performers. A small audience, to be certain, but still an audience. I resented them for being there, and I couldn’t say so, because they’d apparently paid for the privilege.”

The response he gets from Charles is entirely unexpected: a short, surprised bark of laughter. Too many sharp edges. The words are just as dark. “I know what that’s like. To be polite or to thine own self be true? There’s a question for the ages.”

Erik nods, appreciatively, and continues. “It was a frustrating night, to say the least. I would get one waltz right and make mistakes all over the next one. I had to start over on the third waltz at least four times. I could bear the concern from the orchestra, and from the other performers, but when I heard the murmuring from the stalls I wished I had the strength to pick the piano up and throw it at them.”

“You were angry,” Charles says. “And you said you weren’t at your best. Was there an underlying reason for that?”

“Yes.” Erik puts his hands down, flat on the table, but not without an effort.

“Do you mind me asking what it was?”

“No.” A deep, steadying breath. His mind remains blank, but that, too, is not an easy thing to do. “It seems trivial to say it now, but it was a very big deal for me on that night. A bad breakup, in the early hours of the morning. It was difficult to admit that things were over. It was difficult to say goodbye.”

Warmth on his wrist. A pause, and then: “I don’t know much about music or about performing for an audience, but I do know how one can be affected by one’s emotions. You were reeling from a great blow, and yet you got on stage anyway - that’s more than impressive.”

Erik shrugs, but he doesn’t move his hand away from Charles’s. “It was all I could do to play the piano correctly, and it was all I could do to stick with the pieces I was supposed to be rehearsing. I wanted to play something else, something full of grief and anger.

“And then things came to a head when I finally gave up on rehearsing and left the stage.” He bows his head. “I went to the little room that had been assigned to me, and closed the door - and then someone came knocking.

“I still don’t know how I managed to speak steadily or politely. I asked whoever it was to leave me alone.”

“They wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

“ _He_ would not,” Erik says. “Your codename ‘Hornet’. Sebastian Shaw.”

“That was how you met him?” Charles asks.

Erik nods. “He came in abruptly. He had questions for me. I was used to people asking me those questions but I did not feel up to the task of answering them on that particular night.”

“Forgive me, Erik, but I’m not familiar with those questions.”

He sends a wan smirk at Charles. “How did I come by my talent, how did I feel about the pieces I was playing, what was it like to be such a well-regarded performer. I felt like he was mocking me, and I eventually stopped being polite. I asked him to leave me alone, and I closed the door right in his face.”

That gets him a sharp intake of breath. “Oh.”

“Yes. _Oh,_ ” Erik says. “Was that when he decided that he’d act against me? Or did that whim of his wait until he saw me outside the theater? The investigators wondered about that, when they started talking to me. At the hospital. I didn’t have any answers then. I don’t have any now.”

“Erik,” Charles says, urgently, “Shaw has - he’s killed people for so much less than just an answer that he didn’t want to hear - ”

“I know that all too well now.” He grits his teeth. It’s only when he hears his own knuckles creaking that he realizes his hands are hurting, because he’s got them curled into very tight fists. 

With an effort, he unclenches his hands and goes on. “I was only persuaded to leave the theater when one of the other performers told me that they were locking up for the night. Still, I waited till I thought I was alone before I slipped out the back door.

“I remember standing at an intersection and looking up into the night sky, unable to see the stars. I remember that there were people waiting for the green light to cross, and I kept thinking that my lover would be waiting for me - until I remembered that I would be going home to an empty bed. I remember wanting to drink myself into a stupor, only I didn’t know where I’d do such a thing. 

“And then I stepped out onto the street.”

Even now, he still knows exactly what it’s like to be struck head-on by a terrible shriek and what had felt like the entire weight of the world.

His feet leaving the ground. The grasping rush of empty air, catching him, flinging him. Rattling impact.

Now he tastes the grit of broken glass in his teeth, cutting at the insides of his cheeks. Now he smells blood and salt and asphalt on his own breath. Now he hears the discordant chorus of distant laughter and too-near sirens and the voices asking him, over and over, “Can you respond to us, sir? Can you tell us what happened? Can you move your fingers and toes?”

And he remembers Sebastian Shaw, and a twisted grimace of glee. Hands on the steering wheel, steady, never deviating from their chosen course.

“Erik,” Charles says. “Erik. You don’t have to go on.”

“You asked me to tell you the story,” he tells Charles, and his words are short and slack with remembered fear and remembered pain.

“I did,” is Charles’s reply. “And you can tell me the rest another time.”

A solid presence at his side. He leans into his hands on the table, and leans on that presence.

He breathes for a while, and listens to Charles’s breathing.

When he thinks he can trust his voice, he asks, “We’re quite the broken-down people, aren’t we.”

“You and me and all of Section 8, I’d think.”

A hoarse sort of half-rasp escapes his mouth, and he doesn’t know what it is. Impending laughter, or impending tears, or both? “Are you telling me there’s something wrong with - people like Emma Frost, and Moira, and - ” He gropes for the other names. “Jericho? Jean and Betsy and Sean? _Phillip Coulson_?”

“Yes,” is the simple and straightforward answer, and Erik _does_ smile, then - and the smile turns into an odd series of huffs. He can’t stop, not even when he clamps one hand over his mouth - and then Charles joins in.

They’re not really laughing. Erik knows that.


	11. Chapter 11

The streets pass beneath him with a whir and a whine, stressed gears and the clickety-clack of chain, and Charles dashes away the sweat dripping into his eyelashes and keeps pedaling.

A blast of displeased car horns up ahead.

“Ever so obliged,” he mutters, sarcastically, and he leans into the next corner, just misses sideswiping a man pushing a rickety cart full of old and moldy wood. 

There’s no time for apologies, no time for human kindness. 

It’s more than his life’s worth, he thinks, if he loses sight of the car he’s been following all day long.

Another traffic light. Another crowd of fellow cyclists. A blessing and a curse. 

He’s taken pains to disguise himself again. This time the wax in his hair is a too-bright red. A beaten-up tweed jacket with a matching flat cap, which he keeps pulling down, both to avoid the sun that beats down onto the steaming road, and to hide his eyes.

He squints into bright glare as the huge black car pulls farther and farther away.

Another day of chasing after Sebastian Shaw.

He’s careful to stay well back of the car. There’s no telling who else is in there - all Charles caught was a glimpse of the driver, a glimpse of a ruin of a face.

If he’s lucky, he’ll have quite a bit of new information to send back to Section 8 when he’s done for the day.

His thoughts flash briefly to Erik. Worry is a bright red flash on the outer edges of his vision. 

Erik, who had been sitting motionless at the radio when Charles had left, early that morning - silent except for a weary whisper: “Come back alive, Charles.”

He’d responded: “Be here when I get back, Erik.”

He remembers expecting - hoping for - sarcasm.

Now he thinks of Erik’s answer - “I’ll do my best” - and he repeats it. He says the words to himself, to the Erik who isn’t there with him.

“I’ll do my best.”

A bank of clouds overhead. He wishes he could take a breath that wasn’t overheated. His lungs are burning. He can feel the blisters forming on his hands, from the heat and from the handlebars both.

The slender blade he wears in the small of his back is very nearly a furnace in and of itself. He can’t take it off because he can’t be without it. He curses the crushing temperatures - silently, inside his head, in furious unending rounds.

The car with Sebastian Shaw in it powers on, leaves Charles behind in its dust. He loses sight of it around a corner.

“Shit,” he says, wasting an entire breath on the word.

He shifts gears. The bike whines beneath him. He forces his legs to keep moving.

He’s heading north, he thinks.

The houses are getting bigger and bigger on either side of him, and there are trees now. A warm scent of leaves in the air, distant floral notes, a heavy hint of ripening fruit.

He moves from endless white glare to dappled gray and green, and then he turns a corner, past ivy climbing an old brick-and-stone wall.

He stops next to an ornate lamp post half a block away, and watches with narrowed eyes as the black car comes to a stop, the low purr of its engines falling into a near-silent whine.

When the car’s doors open, when he sees the person climbing out, Charles doesn’t flinch, but only just.

Of course he knows that face. A face that is still beautiful, if beauty looked permanently angry, if beauty snarled like a wild beast.

He remembers the wooden handle of an awl, and the sharp flash of its forward movement, and blood staining a vicious grimace.

Selene uncurls from the front passenger seat and bows her head, just, and the mocking smile never leaves her face, even with the outside show of deference.

Charles holds his breath. Waits for Sebastian Shaw to get out of the car. He’ll get on the bike, very calmly, very controlled, if that happens. He’ll get on the bike and turn right around, ride at a leisurely pace until he’s well clear of this gentrified neighborhood.

And then he’ll _run_.

An elaborate iron gate swings open, instead. There’s a happy cry. The sheer incongruity of it makes Charles stare. _Happy_ and _Sebastian Shaw_ , in his mind, are two concepts that do not and cannot at all make sense next to each other. 

A bright smile, and a blur of deep jewel tones, and Charles takes a step back, simultaneously drawn in and repulsed. Codename ‘Hornet’ looks frankly _terrifying_ when he grins, when he jumps out of the car and sweeps the woman who rushes to greet him right off her feet.

“You’re here at last,” the woman says, her voice carrying clearly to Charles.

“Have I kept you waiting too long?” And Shaw grins that skull-like grin of his as he holds the woman at arm’s-length, as he plants an ostentatious kiss in the palm of her hand.

Charles covers his mouth with his hand and doesn’t know whether he’s going to retch or laugh, and the only important thing he can remember is that he cannot give himself away.

Deliberate, careful movements. He cannot draw attention to himself. 

He turns around, pretending to whistle. The bicycle’s wheels whine unhappily at him as he goes, and he tries not to cringe, tries to keep going, slow and steady and away. 

“Anywhere but here,” he mutters to himself, and the whispering leaves overhead may or may not agree with him.

He’s almost to the corner, he’s just a little closer to safety, when he hears the footsteps - and they’re coming from someplace behind and above him.

Adrenaline surge in his veins, in his heart, vicious and choking and welcome, and he moves smoothly and rapidly and without thought. He turns the corner. The bicycle hits the road. The club whistles loudly past the place where his head has just been. The stiletto that he draws as quickly as he can catches the sunlight, bright blinding temporary flash.

An inarticulate roar behind him - he doesn’t have time - he watches the flickering shadow on the road and ducks, weaves, swings his knife.

He catches on something, and the impact batters at the bones in his hand and in his wrist. He grits his teeth, seizes the material in his free hand, twists and turns and he can feel it when his assailant’s feet leave the road. 

Selene rolls up to her feet, doesn’t react to being thrown. She just grins at him, and there’s something terrible about her face, now.

He did that to her, of course. Because she was threatening Erik. Because she was going to take Erik away from him. 

A black eyepatch, and a ragged line of scarring down to her jaw, and hands curled into vicious hooks.

“Still up to your old tricks,” Selene sneers. She leaps forward, teeth bared in a snarl, and Charles doesn’t duck fast enough - she catches him on his cheekbone, sliding sparking impact of pain.

He rolls with it, groaning as he hits the ground and then gets back up.

Pain snakes down his nerves and yet his grip on his knife is still steady.

Selene’s coming at him again, punching and kicking, and he won’t let her herd him, won’t let her take control of the fight.

She tries to connect - he catches her fist in his free hand - hangs on with all of his might and _twists_ \- he can feel her straining against him, he imagines tendons and bone grinding together - 

Her other fist is hurtling towards his face.

He swipes the knife at her oncoming knuckles, and her flesh gives way.

Blood spatter on his cheek, hotter than the air around the two of them.

He’s still applying pressure to her other hand, still twisting.

He turns his knife around and rams the butt of it into the space between Selene’s eyes, and at the same time he finally lets go of her other hand.

He has the temporary pleasure of seeing her begin to fall - darts in and presses his advantage, shoving his shoulder into her midsection, throwing her to the ground.

Red haze in his eyes, and the stinging salt of his own sweat.

He’s tense as he stomps onto Selene’s sternum.

Blood streaming from her nose, the skin around her eye already starting to swell. Somehow she still finds a way to grin up at him, hideous and monstrous. “If you’re thinking of letting me go again you’re really going to be signing your own death warrant,” she says, the shapes of some of the words distorted. “And not just yours. You let me go and I promise you I’ll get up and I’ll find your precious team, your _Erik_ , and I’ll spend a good long time killing them.

“And Shaw will want a turn. You won’t want that to happen. You know what he does to people like you and people like those women you run around with - ”

He stomps onto her chest again - her eye bulges, she chokes on her breath and on her blood. Still the defiance in the lines of her face, still the ugly laughter. 

“You can’t stop him,” she sneers. “He’s already made all of his plans. All he needs to do is get that Worthington cow under his thumb, get rid of her meddling son - and then Providence will burn. Just a few more days and then your precious Section 8 won’t be able to touch him.”

“ _Why_ ,” Charles hisses at last. “What does he want? What has Providence done to him or against him?”

“It’s in his way, that’s all - your stupid government had to go and be all noble and democratic,” and Selene coughs, turns her face to the side, spits vivid red onto the pavement. “He doesn’t like being told no, and that’s what they did to him, over and over again. Big mistake.”

Bile on his tongue, bitter and bloody and terrible. He tightens his grip on his knife. 

He could slit her throat now, and take the body away with him.

He could drag her away with him, force her to talk. Moira would jump at the chance to go after this woman - and after Moira’s done with Selene they could turn over to Emma.

Selene is a dangerous woman, and he’d be risking his life and the lives of the others just to keep her alive, and he knows what he has to do.

He leans over her, smiles, and without any remorse he drives the side of his hand - fingers straight out and rigid as the blade of an ax - right into her throat.

“Don’t take a deep breath,” he advises, watching as her eyes grow wide and then narrow with hatred and returning focus - and Selene does just that.

She immediately begins to choke.

“Told you not to do that,” he says, and he watches her turn pale and blue and desperate, and he thinks there’s ice in his eyes and ice in his veins when he puts her temporarily out of her misery. Another powerful punch, straight between her eyes, into the same spot where he’s already hit her with the back of his knife.

Belatedly, he looks up, looks back around the corner - just in time to see the black car drive away. Presumably Shaw is in there with Kathryn Worthington. He remembers her finery, the blinding colorful flash of bright sun off her jewels, but when he thinks of Shaw pouring her a glass of wine, all he wants to do is yell at her to get away from him.

It might be a little too late for that tactic right now, he thinks, and he still has the problem of Selene to deal with, plus there’s the fact that he has nothing but his bicycle and his own rubbery muscles, his own dwindling strength, about him.

There’s nothing for it.

Before he heaves Selene’s unconscious body onto the baggage rack on the back of his bike he takes great pains to bind her securely: the heavy tweed of the jacket lashing her hands and arms together, the sweat-soaked shirt tied in a series of complicated knots around her ankles. That leaves him in his undershirt and trousers and cap, and that’s not really the strange thing.

The strange thing, of course, is that he’s still going to be lugging the body of a hostile intelligence asset through the streets of the city, and it’s a long way back to Moira’s quarters. He’s going to have some explaining to do. He’ll be lucky if the police don’t stop him at any point between here and there.

It has to be done.

He heaves himself onto the bike, unwieldy with the added dead weight, and starts pedaling, starts fighting for his breath.

///

Erik keys from one station to the other.

His free hand is starting to cramp around the telegraph key, but he doesn’t stop transmitting, not for a moment. Every bit of time is important. Every message is critical. He has to be accurate and he has to be rapid.

The numbers and letters and symbols fly past, in his imagination, and he knows nothing about codebreaking, knows nothing about the work that Maria Hill and her people do. All he knows is that he has to get these signals to Coulson and to Melinda, and to anyone else in their group who must be listening to him, or listening _for_ him.

A dizzying whirl of codes and ciphers and gibberish. Multiple languages that are all mutually unintelligible, multiple languages none of which he can speak, but if the geniuses at Section 8 can break through they might resolve into actual words and numbers and data.

In a way it’s like looking at a sheet of score music, if the information on the sheet translated not into notes and instructions to a musician but into information that could save lives, that could protect great numbers of people.

Erik shifts his shoulders, trying to get comfortable.

There are footsteps approaching. A patter of walking feet, almost a familiar sequence.

He looks in the direction of the door, holding his breath. He waits for the scrape of a key, for the clicks that mean the series of locks is being opened correctly.

Moira speaks in an arch manner, in mocking tones, and he can hear them clearly when she passes him by, throwing the words at him - sharp, but reassuring. “I’m back.”

“Hello,” Erik says, and he goes back to his listening.

Footsteps coming back his way, the rustle of a wrapped package, a thump and sharpish corners nudging Erik’s arm. “Eat something,” she tells him. “I bet you haven’t moved from there. Again.”

“They’re going to send someone here,” Erik says wryly, still clicking away at his Morse code, “to make sure I look after myself.”

“Waste of time,” Moira says, her voice approaching him once again. There’s a quiet thump, and an even smaller sigh of relief, which he graciously pretends he did not hear. “I hate these shoes.”

“Wear something else,” he says.

“You’re not giving me fashion advice, since you dress like you came from a previous century.”

He laughs, shakes his head, takes his hands off the radio and the telegraph set. He turns around in his chair, carefully - the muscles in his back have gone a little stiff, and he knuckles the skin just above his belt, groaning as he works the kinks out. 

“And hark who’s talking, you’re in far worse shape.”

Laboriously he gets to his feet and feels for one of the other chairs, and then he has to go back for whatever it is she’s dropped off for him. “What is this?”

“I can’t compete with your sandwiches, so I brought you pie. I hope you like sour cherry?”

“I do,” he says, and he takes a huge bite out of the generous wedge, and doesn’t mind that the juice spills out over his mouth, doesn’t mind that she snorts inelegantly at his state. He winces, he shudders, he relishes the flaky crust and the plump bits of pulp between his teeth. “Thank you,” he says, eventually, a little garbled.

“You eat like a child,” Moira says, laughing quietly to herself.

“I bet you’re only saying that because I can’t see you eating, nor _what_ you’re eating,” he shoots back. “Let me guess. Candy?”

“I’m not telling you,” is the sing-song reply.

“Fine, don’t tell me if you don’t want to. I’ll ask Charles.”

Laughter. “You wouldn’t dare!”

Erik grins. Bites into his food with relish. “Try me,” he says.

As soon as he finishes the wedge he gets to his feet, taps his way towards the kitchen. He remembers Charles showing him where the tea and coffee things were. The shape of the mug that he’s taken to using is distinct - there’s something about it that reminds him of the swell of a pumpkin, and it has two handles, and it holds a fairly large quantity of tea - more than enough to warm his hands on.

The kettle is next to the sink; he rinses it out, fills it with fresh cold water, and puts it on the stove. Sharp click and whiff of gas. He turns the heat to medium, sets the kettle on, puts tea bags into his cup and Moira’s, waits for the water to boil.

The knock on the door nearly knocks him over, loud and booming - it’s followed by Moira’s sharp voice, and a low scuffling sound that makes Erik think of something heavy. Something being moved.

He just remembers to turn the flame off before he taps hurriedly back in Moira’s direction. “What’s the matter?”

“Hello, Erik,” Charles says. “Give me a moment, and I’ll be more than glad to explain. Moira, more rope.”

Flash of fire chased by flash of ice down Erik’s veins. “ _Rope?_ ”

“Charles has gone and brought someone home,” Moira says, and there are strange notes in her voice, like distaste and eagerness and hatred all at once. “Against their will, I might add.”

“You know our unexpected visitor, Erik,” Charles adds. “You were going to use an awl on her at your very first meeting.”

He actually feels his jaw drop at that. “What are you doing with _Selene_?”

“Of course you’ve met her,” Moira says. “I’m sincerely glad you lived to tell the tale.”

“That’s because of Charles.”

“Of course,” she says again. 

If Erik listens carefully he can hear the long, slow, muffled breaths of their - guest. “Dare I ask what you did to her?”

There’s a grunt of effort, and then Charles replies. “Knocked her out.”

“More like you kicked the stuffing out of her,” Moira says. “And I see she got a couple of good hits in on you.”

“She was trying to kill me.”

“Tell me something I don’t already know.” Moira takes a deep breath. “All right, Charles, what do you want me to pry out of her?”

“Anything and everything you can. The entourage for Shaw’s wedding. The locations of his intelligence teams, plural, because no one can convince me that he doesn’t have redundancies. Where Flemyng and the rest of his toadies are, including the two women I described from one of the earlier reports. What he’s planning to do to poor Kathryn Worthington. I leave it all in your capable hands.”

“It’s like all my birthdays come at once.” Moira’s voice goes flat and determined.

“Let me go and clean up,” Charles adds, “and then I’ll help you wake her up.”

“No need to hurry.”

At a loss for words, Erik turns and follows when he identifies Charles’s footsteps, weaving slowly towards the kitchen. He touches the kettle with the tip of his cane, then touches his cane. Barely warm.

He turns the burner back on, gets out a third mug, turns uncertainly in Charles’s direction. “Coffee or tea or - something?”

“Something,” is the answer. Soft hiss at the end. A quiet curse. “I should have hit her harder. I managed to dodge her, mostly, but I’m still seeing stars.”

Erik opens the cabinet where Moira keeps the alcohol; he opens the bottles, sniffs them one after the other - and he stops when he finds the whiskey, a sharp bracing scent of charcoal and peat and old wood.

The kettle begins to sing, and just as though he were playing etudes, Erik moves smoothly, carefully, deliberately: he turns the stove off. Pours the hot water into the waiting mugs. The scent of tea fills the air, earthy and rich. 

He dashes a small slug of whiskey into his tea - tastes it carefully - nods and doubles the dose for Charles’s drink. “Sugar? I don’t think Moira has any lemon or honey or cinnamon around.”

“Likely not. It will have to be sugar,” Charles says.

“Tea, Moira?” Erik calls into the rest of the house.

“I’ll be there in a moment, thank you,” she says.

Carrying the tea carefully, Erik taps his way around the kitchen to Charles. He sits down in the adjacent chair and takes a long sip.

Next to him, there’s a clink of a spoon being set down, and a thirsty gulping sound - immediately followed by a startled cough. “You put in too much whiskey,” Charles mutters in his direction.

“And that’s a bad thing?” Erik asks.

“Not necessarily,” Charles says, and Erik can hear him trying to finish the cup, hissing determined gulps.

“Slow down,” Erik advises. “You’re coming down from an adrenaline rush and you are using alcohol to come down. Normal people usually do it the other way around: substitute alcohol for courage.”

“I know about that,” Charles says, sounding like he’s gritting the words out. “And how do you?”

Erik knows just how to answer that question. “ _Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini_ , by Sergei Rachmaninoff,” he says, deliberately casual. “The composer was to premiere his own work, which consists of the theme and then twenty-four variations - the very last of which is technically difficult for even a skilled performer, which Rachmaninoff himself was. He confessed that he had serious doubts about being able to play the twenty-fourth variation, so a friend of his suggested taking something to steady his nerves. That something was - I suppose it was a _small_ measure of alcohol, since he was going on stage, and since he was a teetotaler if he wasn’t going to perform that piece.” He smiles. “Now we call that twenty-fourth variation the Crème de Menthe Variation.”

“ _Ugh_ ,” Charles says, and then, suddenly, he laughs. Brief though the sound might be it seems genuine to Erik’s ears. “I hate that stuff. Mint is for brushing your teeth, not for getting drunk.”

But the words taper off into a silence that makes Erik think of a piano string being pulled, taut and tauter still, until it’s thoroughly tense, until it’s at the brink of snapping. 

“Do I owe you an apology, Erik?” Charles asks, abruptly. Mixed in with the words are the sounds of glass being moved around, and the quiet gurgle of more liquid being poured. “For bringing her here, because you work here, and we are about to do unpleasant things to her, in order to keep people safe - in order to keep _you_ safe?”

Erik frowns. “Unpleasant things,” he says, slowly. He tries to translate it into something else, something more easily parsed, but all that comes out is: “You’re going to interrogate her.”

“And I am almost certain we will have to resort to violence to make her talk.”

“But you say it’s for a good cause.”

“I think it is, and I think that Moira knows that the cause is as good as any. Selene knows things about Shaw. She keeps secrets for him. Secrets that we need to know. Lives may depend on us unearthing those secrets.”

“And you’ll do anything to get to those secrets.”

“Yes,” Charles says. The words are like the leftmost keys on a grand piano, held and vibrating and rumbling.

Erik folds his hands together atop the table. “Let’s say you do manage to extract something of value from her - then what? You send the information back to Emma Frost, and - ?”

“And she can use the information against Shaw. Against the people who are following Shaw’s lead and Shaw’s orders. The safety and security of Providence is the overarching consideration.”

“Which you and yours elevate above your very lives.”

“Shouldn’t we?” Something hits the table with a decisive _click_. “I say the safety and security of Providence when what I actually mean is - something bigger and more important than that. I don’t think in terms of some kind of nebulous concept that can only be discussed by people who spend too much time playing word games. I’ve been there, I’ve done that, I’ve put it behind me.

“I think, instead, in terms of - this apartment building, let’s say,” Charles says. The words are quiet and focused and rapid-fire, full of conviction. “In terms of the men and women and children who live here. I think that I am capable of doing quite a lot of terrible things on their behalf. And I’ll do those terrible things when I’m called upon to do them.” Another pause. “I would never say that I would always be willing. I would never say that I wouldn’t be carrying the guilt of these terrible things around with me. I don’t count the cost because I know it will be there, no matter what I try to do. Which is a terrible thing to know, but it’s also a relief in its own way, because maybe I’m just deluding myself but that would be what sets me apart from Selene, from Shaw, from the man who killed Melinda’s family.”

“From the people who killed Janos.” Erik clenches his hands into fists.

“Assuming I didn’t bring one of the culprits back here,” Charles says. “So, now you know.

“Can you understand that about us? About Section 8? Can you understand what we do and balance that against the ultimate reason why we do those things?”

Erik thinks - but not about Section 8, and not about the men and women hunched over radios, or the men and women trying to pry meaning out of haphazard strings of numbers and symbols and letters. He thinks about Angel: about what she didn’t know and about what he now knows, including Charles’s visit and the Easter lilies. 

He thinks about Ilyana, about her telling him that she spent an entire summer’s afternoon just playing hopscotch, or that a dog growled at her while she was on her way to school, and he thinks about that sweet and easy freedom, and for a moment he’s envious. Ilyana doesn’t have to think about people who want her and her family dead simply because they professed allegiance to one government or one way of thinking instead of another.

The people who do that kind of thinking are the people he currently works with.

“If I tell you I understand what’s going on - can I tell you that I don’t like it?” he asks.

“Of course you can.” Charles’s response is swift. “And if it makes you feel any better - that makes you no different from a lot of people in Section 8.”

Erik nods, and moves his hand across the tabletop, in the direction of Charles’s voice.

“Charles, she’s coming around,” Moira calls, suddenly. “I might need a little help.”

He stops moving. “Your work calls,” he says, “and I have to return to mine.”

Warmth on his fingers, calluses. Charles’s voice is low, and Erik has to lean in to hear him clearly. “Yes, work calls - but just now, I thought that I’d like to thank you.”

He responds in the same quiet tone. “For what? The tea?”

“Well, that too,” Charles says. “But mostly because you ask interesting questions. Because you and I have never had a conversation that didn’t make me think.”

That makes him smile. “I always enjoy speaking with you, Charles, even in the spaces where no one is actually saying anything.”

Charles’s fingers freeze, for a moment, and then relax again. “I - thank you, Erik.”

“You’re welcome, Charles.” 

He turns his head, then, and in the process his nose brushes against warm skin, tracks of dried and still-damp sweat, and a hint of five-o’clock shadow.

Charles smells like exertion and nerves and the whiskey that Erik had poured into their tea - and he smells, too, like scorched grass, like petrichor, like rich dark coffee.

He holds his breath when he realizes where he is. He’s expecting Charles to pull away at any moment. 

Charles does, but slowly, and his presence lingers, as though he were loath to move away.

Finally, he whispers something, too close to Erik’s own skin: “If only I could stay here.”

And then Charles truly has gone, and Erik can hear Charles’s footsteps moving away. He can hear Charles’s voice, brisk and brief as he asks Moira to move Selene further away from the table where the radio and the telegraph key are.

He can hear the rush and flow of the blood in his veins, the high singing note of triumph in his head, like sustaining a perfect chord until it bleeds away into sweet tense silence.

///

“You’re going to make a mistake, and you’re going to turn around and leave me alone, and when you do I will take such pleasure in escaping and _slitting your throats_ ,” Selene says, low and raspy. Her face is schooled into a snarl of a threat, but Charles doesn’t have to squint to see the twitch in the corners of her eyes. 

Something has gone from that haughty facade, and he really, really wants to know where the cracks begin, so he can keep working on them, so he can widen them and dig them deeper.

“And I’ll start with that operator of yours. He won’t resist me - how can he? He can’t see! I’ll kill him and make the two of you watch, and it’ll be just like - _argh!_ ”

“I thought you hated those shoes,” Charles asks, when he looks up from the heel of Moira’s boot, and into the completely blank canvas of her face. The distaste from earlier is gone. 

He thinks of her as his friend, and he thinks of her as someone to trust, but right now those ideas are nowhere near her, and she is instead _cold_.

“I said something like that, too,” Erik says from the other side of the room, and the clicks and clacks of his telegraph key are woven into his words.

Moira clasps her hands behind her back and twists her booted foot back and forth, digging her heel and its edges further into Selene’s bared skin. “I hate them,” Moira says, “but I have to admit that they are sometimes more than useful. Sometimes, they’re the only tools for the job.”

He concedes the point by bowing his head, briefly. 

After a moment he watches as Moira gets off Selene’s foot, and makes as if to step away. “Have you thought about answering my questions yet, Selene?”

“I didn’t hear any,” Selene snaps.

“Wrong answer,” Moira says, and she whips around and kicks Selene in the knee.

Charles has to tell himself he only imagined the sound of something snapping, or being popped loose, or worse.

“You see,” Moira continues, as she reaches up to twirl a few strands of her own hair in her fingers, “I’ve quite the long list of questions. I’m interested in getting answers to every single one of them. And I don’t just mean short questions, hmm? I want details. I want essays’ worth of information.”

“Then I’m afraid I’ll just have to be disappointing you,” Selene says, and the corners of her mouth are drawn up into a sneer. “Talking’s not what I do. You snatched the wrong person for the job.”

“I suppose I might have.” Moira taps her fingers against each other, assumes a polite smile. “Oh, I’ve just remembered. It seems I interrupted you earlier. Let me see - you threatened to kill my fellow operative over there - ” Here she flashes a small, tight-lipped smile in an oblivious Erik’s direction - “And you’ll make me and Charles watch, and it’ll be just like - what? Done any killing lately? Was it interesting? How much blood was there?”

Selene’s face twists yet again: this time she looks like she actually wants to pull away from Moira, from Moira’s monotone, from Moira’s quiet “Ah!” when - Charles squints - she finds a hangnail and proceeds to pick at it with a seemingly single-minded focus.

A minute ticks by, and then another. He’s listening to the clock, and he’s listening to Erik, and he’s wondering if he might be able to get away with borrowing a leaf from Jean’s book: she trims her fingernails with the short sharp blade that she carries in one of her pockets. 

“Waiting,” Moira says, still in that same monotone.

“What the hell do you want me to say to you?” Selene growls.

“Just answer the question - just the one for now: Who. Did. You kill.”

Selene actually looks away. An actual flash of what looks like worry flickers across that ragged face - but it vanishes, and the mask of smug bravado drops back into place. “Oh, some telegraph operator, no one important,” she says.

Charles narrows his eyes at her, trying to figure out her thought processes. Is she hoping to enrage Moira or get her into a fight? 

If Selene thinks Moira’s prone to emotional outbursts, if Selene thinks Moira will make a mistake of some kind that might allow her to get out of this place - he can’t help but smile a little, and shake his head, because Selene is profoundly mistaken, and he knows that to be absolutely true.

A part of him wishes that Erik could watch this interrogation.

He knows for a fact that if Moira happens to be at the Section 8 post with someone to interrogate, people will find some way to watch her, complete with cups of freshly-made coffee and whatever snacks they can scrounge up from the mess halls or from the drawers in their desks. As though Moira were a high-level practitioner of some wildly popular spectator sport.

He remembers sitting in on one such interrogation and getting passed an apple by Sean, and he remembers taking a bite and passing it on to the person on his right, who turned out to be Emma Frost herself. He remembers people muttering among themselves at each answer, interlaced with groans and bright red blood, and remembers muttering thanks in his own turn when Emma Frost passed him a handful of wizened raisins without looking at him, because she was so intent on the monitor that was focused on Moira’s victim.

Now he’s within an arm’s length of this particular interrogation and he looks down at the sheets of plastic material laid out around the chair into which Selene has been secured, and he thinks about backing away. Perhaps he’d do well to sit next to Erik.

Moira is speaking again.

“Telegraph operators are important,” she says, as if mildly admonishing, and mildly disappointed. “I imagine this one got too far past your codes, was finding out far too much about your employer’s work? I’d like to know how you got - him? Her? Tell me the story.”

Selene looks away. Her mouth in a thin line. The bruises on her face are dark and in the shape of Charles’s fist.

“No? All right,” Moira says, and she swiftly, calmly, slaps Selene. “One. I’ll keep hitting you if you don’t respond. You have two minutes.”

Charles counts off the seconds in his head - but Moira lands the next strike when he gets to one hundred, and this time she draws blood. Imprints of nails raking across Selene’s other cheek.

Selene keeps looking away - but she shakes her head, just a bit.

Moira’s response to that is to clap the palms of her hands over Selene’s ears, and that gets her a sharp small gasp.

“Hurts, doesn’t it?” Moira asks after another moment. “I can do this all night long if I have to. I have done this before. I can make you change your mind.” Charles watches her lean into Selene’s face, too close. “Talk to me.”

Thirty minutes later Selene is twisting in her seat, hissing and gurgling in pain.

Moira is still standing behind her, fists raised to strike. “Call it, Charles, do you want me to hit her in the other kidney or do you want me to hit her in the same place?”

He doesn’t get a chance to answer, because Selene exhales by way of a loud and pained gasp, and says, “I’ll talk, damn you. Stop hitting me.”

“No promises,” Moira says. “If you talk and I think you’re lying to me, I’ll hit you. If you talk and I _know_ you’re lying to me, I’ll hit you even harder. I’ll start breaking bones. You only think you’re in pain now. I promise you I haven’t even started. So talk to me, and talk about the truth.”

“All right, all right,” Selene whines.

“Tell me about the telegraph man or woman.”

“Man,” Selene says. “We snatched him on his way back from that hotel in the center of the city. He never saw us coming. Two women to distract him. I stuck a needle in the back of his neck while they were trying to ask him for directions to some landmark or other.”

“Keep going,” Moira says.

“We asked him to tell us where you and the rest of your people were. The frequencies of your stations. The locations of your listening posts. We asked him about Emma Frost and what her plans were. We asked him about what he’d already heard from us.

“He wouldn’t talk. Not even to answer _What is your name?_ Just - ” Selene shakes her head. “Just made such a godawful racket.”

Charles cocks an eyebrow at her. “How so?”

Selene bares her teeth at him, wordlessly.

Moira backhands her, a seemingly careless blow, but he sees the chair pull up onto its two back legs as Selene recoils from the force of it. “Answer the man.”

“He whistled,” Selene says. “Whistled and whistled. Even after we started breaking his teeth. He was awful at it to begin with. The more we hurt him, the harder we hit him, the worse the sounds became.”

“Oh, fuck,” Moira says, and Charles says it with her.

And then: a third voice, Erik saying the exact same word. “ _Fuck._ ”

By them time Charles knows he’s already on the move, he’s on his feet and heading toward the telegraph set and the radio.

Erik’s face is twisted in pain and memory and - Charles stops well short of him, and stares at the other man as he bares his teeth at Selene.

“You killed Janos,” Moira says, as if from very far away.

Only the time he’s spent working with Moira allows Charles to hear the volcanic fury in her voice, buried so deeply into the syllables, heaving and burning out the emotions from her words.

“What did you do to him.”

Charles risks a glance over his shoulder.

The blood has drained from Selene’s face. 

The chair creaks ominously beneath her weight. Her feet braced on the plastic, tense sharp curves. The lines of her body shying away from the woman standing over her.

“What did you _do_ ,” Moira asks again.

The words trickle out at first - “Stripped him, bound him, beat him” - but Charles is barely listening to the sounds coming out of Selene’s mouth. That’s not what made him look up, and catch a shocked breath, and stare.

What does fear look like? He knows he’s seen it in his own eyes, too many times to count even before he could bolt from the house where he’d been born and raised and neglected.

He’s seen fear in the eyes of his friends, of his comrades: sick and shaking and pained.

He remembers seeing fear in Erik’s face, the lines of it contorted almost beyond recognition, in the instant before he touched the point of his awl to his own temple.

Now the fear in Selene’s eyes makes him think of deflation, of the skin of a lion already cured and trimmed and laid out as a harmless rug - the permanent shock etched into a formerly fierce face, possibly with a gun, or with a long knife. He can see her turn into prey right as Moira curls both hands around Selene’s throat - a gasp, the air flowing freely, the corners of that haughty mouth turned permanently downwards.

“I’m not going to kill you like this,” Moira growls, a promise and a threat. “Too easy. Too gentle. They told me you ruined him. He was my friend. He was my companion. He was _mine_ , you understand that? Mine. And you took him away from me.” A long trembling breath, without tears, without sadness - nothing left in her but her determination, warring with her hatred, and she is beyond livid. She is incandescent, all but afire. “You’re going to keep talking. And I’m going to remember everything you say. And then - and then you’ll see what I’m going to do to you. I promise you it will be nothing at all like what you did to him.”

“Moira,” Charles says, and a host of conflicting emotions chokes him on those two syllables.

“Not now, Charles,” is the reply. “Go away, and you know I mean that kindly. You don’t have to be here for this. You don’t have to be a witness. I’m giving you an opportunity to cover your arse. I’m giving you an opportunity to say, in all complete honesty, that _you have no idea what happened here_. I very strongly suggest you take that opportunity.”

“And me?” Erik asks, faint and breathless, from somewhere behind Charles. “Am I included in that?”

“Yes.” A deep breath.

Charles catches it just in time as a haunted expression ghosts across Moira’s face.

“I know he was your friend, too, Erik, but I hope you’ll allow me this little thing.”

“I wouldn’t dream of taking it away from you.” There’s a creak, and a rasping that sounds like Erik gritting his teeth.

Charles looks at Erik’s hands as they set the headphones aside, as they put Janos’s things in order. Erik seems absolutely steady - it’s his jaw that tics and twitches, not the rest of him, as he gropes for his cane and murmurs “Excuse me” in Charles’s direction.

Charles gets out of the man’s way, watches as Erik approaches Moira, hand held out.

Moira, in turn, uncurls one hand from around Selene’s neck to hold on to Erik, if just for a moment.

“She’s all yours,” Erik says.

To her credit Selene doesn’t react until Charles has ushered Erik out the door; as he checks the locks, he glances at her, and there’s something punctured and ugly in her expression, the way her jaw has sagged open - prey, Charles thinks again. A predator who finally realized that she, in turn, was some other predator’s easy pickings.

How could she have forgotten that, he thinks to himself. How could she have ignored that simple truth? For every predator is also prey: if not to something bigger or stronger, then to death, and to decomposition, and to the earth itself.

He wonders, then, if _Shaw_ understands that truth.

“Sorry,” Charles says, half to Selene and half to Moira, and he closes the door.

On the other side, Erik is leaning on the wall, hunched in on himself. Even with the sunglasses on, the fear in his face is still nakedly obvious.

“She’s going to kill Selene, isn’t she,” he whispers, after a long pause.

“Normally I would say _no_ ,” Charles says. “But now that we know the connection between Moira and Janos - all bets are off. Selene could be dead in the morning, or she could still be alive - ”

“ - Just barely - ”

“Or - something else. I don’t want to think about it. Not now.”

“Neither do I.” Erik pushes off from the wall. “But where do we go? I have been staying here, on the couch, because I’ve been busy. I can navigate the rooms, but not that well, since I haven’t been here long, and I don’t know how much longer I’ll be here.” A pause. He looks like he’s thinking, with his eyebrows almost knotted together, joined end to end. “I don’t think I can go back to my place. I’ve been gone for some time. Besides, Section 8’s got the rest of my things at the post.”

“I almost wish I could get another drink,” Charles says, almost contemplatively. “Though I don’t know whether I want that drink so I can remember what just happened, or so that I can forget that it did.”

“I want to play the piano,” Erik says.

“And I’d love to listen to you play, if you were up for an audience. If wishes were horses,” Charles sighs. “Come on. We have to be rational, we have to keep our wits about ourselves, because we are walking behind enemy lines, so to speak. Shaw is somewhere in the city, with or without his unlucky intended, and we are not going to run into them tonight.”

“So where to, then?”

The more Charles thinks about it the more he’s convinced that there’s only one possible destination for the two of them tonight, and he winces, briefly and guiltily thankful Erik won’t know about the expression.

The couch in his apartment, if it could even be called that, is a little bit rickety, and a whole lot lumpy, and hell on his back and everything else.

But that’s where he’ll be spending the night.

Charles takes a deep breath and looks at Erik, and tries to smile, hoping Erik will hear it when he says, “You can stay in my rooms tonight. At the very least you’ll know that I’ll be there, and armed, and watching over you. It’s something we’ve done before.”

“It’s something we seem to be making a habit of,” is Erik’s reply. “I hope you’re not getting tired of looking after me.”

He reaches out for Erik’s hand, squeezes briefly, lets him go despite the impulse that makes him want to hang on. “I’m not. Please don’t think about it that way. You are not a burden, not on me, not on Section 8. We rely on you, to be honest. We need the skills you have.”

Erik says nothing, only nods.

Out on the street, Charles eases his stiletto out of its scabbard, and murmurs, “Will you mind it very much if you walked ahead of me? I need to watch your back, and I need to have enough space to swing if it should be needed. I promise I’ll protect you.”

“I will, and I understand - but where do I go?” Erik asks. “I don’t know where your place is.”

“I’ll give you directions, of course - starting with, let’s go on up the street. We’ll turn left at the second corner.”

“Straight ahead up the street, turn left at the second corner, I understand,” Erik says. He steps off in a steady, determined rhythm that makes Charles think of marching. The tap of Erik’s cane on the pavement keeps time for the hurried beat of Charles’s heart. He looks around at the impassive facades of the residential buildings that rise into the night. The sleepy and careworn faces of the few people they pass by - some of them walk slowly and wearily, and some of them walk briskly, as if in anticipation.

A musical sound in the night, unexpected, but he already knows that voice. 

Erik comes to a stop at a corner, cocks his head to listen for engines rumbling, taps his way unerringly out onto the pedestrian lane. The white lines on the black asphalt are misted around the edges as night continues to deepen.

Charles follows his hum as they navigate a series of narrow and narrowing alleys. 

They’ve been walking a good twenty minutes, and Charles is about to tell him that they’re almost there, when Erik clears his throat, and asks, “Where are we going again? It feels a little as though I have been leading you in circles. More importantly, where are we? I’m not at all familiar with this part of the city.”

“I should be apologizing,” Charles says, and he steps forward, and draws level with Erik, touches his wrist so the man knows he’s there. “I did think rather seriously about taking the more roundabout route, but - well. I suppose we’re safe enough here.”

“The more roundabout route,” Erik repeats, and every word is colored with disbelief, and Charles can’t blame him for it. “And where is _here_?”

“Stop here,” Charles says, instead of answering the actual question. “Stairs to your right. Up you go. I’m on the second floor.”

He listens to Erik’s slowed-down steps. The long white line of Erik’s cane cuts through the darkness, like an unexpected beacon. An empty landing, and Erik’s hand on the railing, feeling out the grain of the cracked and weathered wood, worn smooth by years of tenants coming and going.

Charles extracts his keys from his pockets. The door seems to be in order - he glances at the doorknob, and even in the darkness he can see that his tell-tales are still in place. A strand of dark brown thread, just one, hanging from the keyhole; a specific pattern of nicks on the doorknob; a tiny triangle of paper stuck in the crack between the door and its jamb, as if it had been caught there entirely by accident.

“Let me go in first,” he whispers in Erik’s direction - and he nods, approvingly, when Erik flattens himself against the wall, shoulders against the stone in a tense line.

He pushes the door in, waits for a count of three, until his eyes have adjusted to the shadows, to the bars of light coming in from the windows set into the opposite wall, just below the line of the sagging ceiling. A familiar enough darkness, a familiar enough silence. Still, he’s tense as he reaches for the nearest light switch, as he flips it on.

Flicker, flicker, and reluctantly the little room fills with light, bright intense glare that he squints against, so he doesn’t entirely lose his eyesight.

The room is empty.

The corners are full of boxes, papers spilling out, and the occasional reel of microfilm. Books in neat stacks on the table. A cup overflowing with pens and chewed-on stubs of pencil.

Charles eyes the couch and the hideous afghan on top, striped in brown and green and purple, and shakes his head ruefully.

Beyond that is the bed, with the covers pulled neatly up, but when Charles closes his eyes and opens them again, there are still only two pillows, beaten hopelessly flat, and still bearing the imprints of the last restless nap. Had that been only yesterday?

“Charles,” Erik says, his voice drifting in nervously.

There’s no point in cleaning up.

Charles walks back to the door. Sticks his head out into the corridor, looking at the tense lines of Erik. “Come on in. Mind the books, they’re everywhere at this point.”

He’s expecting Erik to frown at that possibility of inconvenience, or at least look apprehensive. 

He’s not expecting Erik to raise his eyebrows, to quirk a thin smile that is partly a question.

He’s not expecting Erik to tiptoe in, moving his cane in delicate arcs, as if loathe to strike anything and thus inflict damage.

He’s not expecting Erik to stop as soon as he encounters the first pile of books - whereupon he drops to one knee and carefully picks up the topmost volume. “May I?” he asks.

Charles secures his tell-tales and the door, and braces himself against it. “Of course.”

Erik’s fingertips on the pebbled maroon leather, carefully stroking the worn material. Riffling through the pages. “What am I holding, Charles?”

He slides his knife back into its sheath before stepping over to Erik’s side and squinting at the front cover. A long title that looks like a mishmash of familiar jargon - the language of another life - and his own name near the bottom, in fading gold. “It’s a collection of papers,” he says. “Written by, well, by yours truly. Not my dissertation; I never got around to writing one of those.”

Erik nods, makes an encouraging sound.

Charles laughs softly and lifts the volume from Erik’s hands. The pages crackle softly as he flips through them, back and forth, eyes alighting on familiar passages - quotes from books, tables of data, hypotheses and conclusions and citations. “Half the time I only thought I knew what I was actually doing,” he says. “Fortunately the scientific community seemed to be willing to accept my intellectual flailings-about.”

Erik laughs, the sound muffled by the clutter of their surroundings.

Hilarity sits so much better on the austere lines of his face than does worry, or tension - though not as well as the concentration he wears when faced with a telegraph key, or with a piano.

Charles shakes his gaze away, heads toward his tiny cubbyhole of a kitchen. He rinses the kettle and the stream of running water fills the room with chattering echoes. “Tea, Erik?”

“I’m fine,” Erik replies.

“More for me, then,” Charles says, and gets the tea things out. He’s almost absurdly grateful that the tea canister is just a little less than half full, and he breathes in the rich and earthy spiciness of the leaves with not a little relief.

He can get through the night, he thinks, or what’s left of it, if he’s got enough tea on hand.

All right, so he has neither cream nor sugar in his pantry, so he’ll have to take the tea black, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, since the slightly astringent notes of it should help keep him awake. 

He goes through the rest of the motions, grateful for the temporary silence in his head, his thoughts falling quiescent as he scalds his chipped mug with the glued-back-on handle.

Someone in the flat is humming.

Charles blinks, because he knows there can only be one other voice in here with him, and he puts the tea things down, looks back at the man occupying the couch.

Erik isn’t playing any imaginary pianos this time, mostly because there are no surfaces around him to serve as a keyboard. It doesn’t seem to deter him, because the melody lilts along, rising and falling, a little hesitant in places like the steps of something newly born, and it makes Charles think of painful understanding and hard-won hope. Notes like hooks in his skin, sweetly pulling him in, and before he knows it he’s standing over Erik, he’s looking down at Erik’s hands folded in his lap and he’s looking down at the lines in Erik’s face.

When Charles manages to unstick his tongue his words are a little breathless around the edges. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t quite able to place that,” he says. “Who wrote it? Because it’s beautiful. Is there any more?”

The humming stops, and the flush rises in Erik’s cheeks, but he tips his chin up proudly and says, “Yes, there’s more - it’s intended to be performed by a piano and a full orchestra. And the reason why it’s unfamiliar is because - I wrote it, or I’m writing it, in bits and pieces. It’s a little unfinished as of the moment.”

“It’s yours?” Charles asks, as he sits down on the other end of the couch, tea quite forgotten.

Erik nods. “I started writing it while I was back at the post. The result of one or two sleepless nights.”

Charles shuts his mouth, which has been hanging open at Erik’s words. He thinks about sympathy, and about how the other man would take it if it were offered. “I want to tell you that you should finish it.”

“I want the same thing,” Erik says. “But it is as you said. There is work that needs doing, and it is vital work - and composing is not that work. I should get back to it, if I can. Do you have a radio here?”

“No,” Charles says. “I go to one of the other teams if I need to send messages back to the post, or I use what’s available if I’m in another location.”

“This is - home?”

“This is where I sleep,” Charles admits. “I don’t really think this place suits any definition of that word.”

“Your books are here, I’m assuming. Not just the one I was handling earlier.” Erik sniffs the air. “That and tea, of course.”

“Then if that was your definition of home - I should have all my mail sent to the tea room where Moira and I often meet, since I’m there far more often than I’m really here,” Charles says, laughing softly. “And they serve sandwiches that are almost passable.”

“Only passable?” Erik lifts an eyebrow, a dark curve in the light of the room.

“Yours are far, _far_ better.”

That gets him a laugh, and Charles slouches back into the crook of the couch, feeling satisfied, despite the lumps and bumps of broken springs and patchy stuffing.

Erik’s chuckles taper off, gradually, and the couch creaks and complains, making Charles look over and raise his eyebrows. “What are you doing with that old thing?” he asks as Erik wrestles with the afghan. 

Once again, he’s thankful Erik doesn’t have to look at its awful colors, and he pinches his nose against the impending threat of a headache.

“It’s warm,” Erik says.

That makes Charles blink. He can still feel the aftereffects of the hot stove and of the almost-boiling kettle. “You’re cold?”

“You’re not?”

“No,” Charles says.

Erik snorts quietly, and finishes laying the afghan out over his lap.

When Erik folds his hands over his stomach and leans against the back of the couch, clearly looking like he’s planning to sleep, Charles exclaims, “There is a bed!”

“So?” Erik asks, his voice fallen into a low and sleepy grumble that is also, strangely, attractive.

“So you’re sitting on a lump of a couch when you could do so much better.” Charles makes another face, glances at his sagging bed. “Well. A _little_ better than this.”

Erik shakes his head, a brief movement, as though he truly is tired. “Off you go then,” he rumbles. “Stay there. Let me sleep, since I’m not going to be able to work. I’m settled here.”

“You’re going to be quite sorry in the morning,” Charles says, in a last-ditch effort.

“Then I will be.” Erik rolls his shoulders one more time. “Sleeping now.”

“I cannot believe it - ” Charles begins, but he says it quietly, and he cuts himself off as soon as Erik’s breaths even out.

He didn’t even take off his sunglasses.

Something comes undone in Charles when Erik sighs and turns his head.

There is such peace in the man’s face, with all of its lines; there is such stillness in those hands, still gracefully curved.

Charles stares, and it’s not the first time he’s felt guilty about looking at a man who cannot see him looking, and knowing that - he’s still compelled towards one more invasion of Erik’s privacy.

“I’m so sorry,” Charles says, knowing he’ll say it again in the morning, not knowing how Erik will treat him after his confession - but he gets to his feet, he crosses the distance to Erik, and he bends to Erik and kisses him, very softly, just at his temple, where there are a few stray silver strands winding through the dark hair.

A quiet sound escapes Erik.

Charles stares at him again, caught on hearing it, because that sound may or may not be the word _Charles_ , falling from Erik’s lips, when he’s unguarded and most of the way to unconscious.

He backs away, still staring at the sleeping Erik as he stumbles his way back to his bed. The floor is hard beneath him as he sinks to his knees at the foot of the frame.

He’s awake, and the minutes creep by, and he watches and he waits and his heart never stops pounding in his chest, all because of Erik’s whispering.


	12. Chapter 12

Erik listens, and he doesn’t know what he needs to focus on, so he pays attention to everything and nothing all at once.

The steady click and clatter of Morse code in his ears, translated and transmitted through his fingers to allied ears in Section 8. Speed and accuracy, and the hope that there’s someone listening who’ll be able to make sense of the signals.

It’s always been a disconcerting thing, to know that he’s listening to dits and dahs that translate into familiar characters, but when he puts the characters together in his own head - a detached part, that, just a little disconnected from the rest of him, which is occupied with sending the signals along to Coulson and Melinda, and eventually to Maria - he gets nothing but gibberish, nothing he can make actual heads or tails of.

Even the strings of digits being transmitted by the various numbers stations stop making sense after the first fifty or one hundred places, and he can’t hear any patterns from them.

He thinks about feeling helpless, but only for a moment.

He can’t dwell on that feeling - it’s only self-destructive, the worst kind of distraction.

Pulse of a signal in his ears, and he translates it into another series of characters, sends that along.

He tunes to the next station, and to the next, until he’s completed another circuit, once up the frequencies and then down again to check for strays and unscheduled transmissions.

And as soon as he pushes the telegraph key away, as soon as he takes off the headphones, he can hear the other set of signals. Human speech this time, and broken into sounds and words and phrases, but that doesn’t always mean that he can always make sense of them either.

Such as right now: Moira and Charles not five feet away, arguing it sounds like, from the hissing intensity of their voices.

Erik cocks his head as he resolves the anger burning through the syllables, the pure sheer vitriol, and his heart begins to speed up as though he’s walking again to center stage to sit at a concert grand piano, gleaming under the hot bright lights.

“What is the _point_ in waiting - ”

“Moira. You know why. We have to make sure that everyone’s here, that everyone’s in position - I know you’ve been waiting for this - ”

“Damn right I have been!”

“Emma Frost will not be happy if we lose anyone because of recklessness, and _neither will I_ , and you know that - ”

“Why does it have to take so long! Lives are at stake - _this entire damn country_ \- ”

“Because we are dealing with someone who’s just as bloody _smart_ as we are.”

A gasp. Moira’s voice changes suddenly: shock, and respect, and a begrudging truth. “No one has been willing to admit that. There are people in Section 8 who will not accept such a thing.” 

Charles makes an aborted sound of some kind, and Erik thinks of it as halfway between a growl and a groan, and he aches with a sympathy that he cannot parse. “Then they are willfully blinding themselves and the rest of us along with them.” A sigh. Charles continues, still rough, but also as though he’s slumped over. “I’m only grateful Emma Frost is in charge. Because _she_ knows what we’re up against. What we’ve been up against all this time.”

Erik listens, keenly, and he wishes he could reach out for Charles.

He’s not sure if Charles needs the support, or is even open to the idea of it, but he’d like to offer it, nevertheless.

Oh, he’s known about Charles, now. Since the night Erik spent at his place, full of the smells of old and crackled paper and reheated tea - he knows he felt the shadow of Charles’s mouth against his skin, and he’d wanted to turn into that touch, he’d wanted to let Charles know he was welcome, but he’d been so tired.

He knows about Charles walking more closely, and he’s tried to encourage it, close enough that Charles’s shoulder brushes against his arm, that their wrists touch as they stand next to each other at the pedestrian crossing just a block away from Moira’s quarters.

He also knows about Charles standing over him when he’s working at the radio. Charles’s breathing is a pianissimo rhythm, seemingly buried under the streams of static and signal and transmission, but Erik can hear him, as clearly as he can hear his own heartbeat in his ears.

The words continue, a little more subdued, though it seems like the argument has been cut short for the time being. “How is your surveillance of the Worthingtons?” Charles asks, and Erik leans in to listen to the question that Moira lobs back at him.

“Are we just talking about the gossip mill, or are we talking about actual observations and suchlike?”

“Start with the facts, if you please,” Charles says, wryly.

A riffling of papers undercuts Moira’s response. “Well, for starters, the family enterprises look like they’ll be having another good year. Profits up across the board, though they also seem to be spending quite a lot on other things.”

“Such as?”

“Hiring more people and opening more offices.” Moira clears her throat. “All sunshine and rainbows, I’d expect, and more charitable giving, coordinated through the man at the top himself - but that’s not what people are actually talking about these days. The good news seems to be a mere bagatelle, next to the bad.”

“Let’s have the bad news, and the gossip.”

“The gossip is that Warren Worthington III is fighting a war behind the scenes, and that he is dangerously close to losing that war.”

“He’s fighting his own mother,” Charles says.

“Who is, unfortunately, being used as a puppet by Sebastian Shaw,” Moira says. “And to forestall the very obvious question, yes, people are asking questions about the man, but they are not asking nearly enough questions, or they are not asking those questions nearly often enough. They want to know about him, and they want to know what he wants to do with the Worthington family’s assets and business enterprises, and they’re not asking about who he really is or _why_ he’s making the power play in the first place.”

Erik says, mostly under his breath, “More fool them.”

A pause, as of people hearing something that they didn’t want to hear, and needed to. “Yes,” Charles says. “They’ve forgotten you. Is this a condition that might need remedying - ?”

“No, please don’t.” Erik shakes his head. “I don’t mind being forgotten. There are days when I prefer to be forgotten. But I cannot really say the same about Shaw. I - I find it hard to believe that he’s all over the news, he’s currently being celebrated or vilified or gossiped about, and yet people cannot connect him to - well, the things he used to do.”

“The things he’s still up to, if we want to be honest about it,” Moira says. “He’s just gotten a little bit more careful with the murders and the bribery and the spy games.”

“Which leads me to ask,” Erik says, after a moment, “what Maria and the others have been sending you. You were arguing about something. May I ask about it?”

He has enough time to get up and try to work out the kinks in his lower back before giving up with a frustrated hum, and tapping gingerly towards the table where the others are already seated.

“Come around, Erik, I’m in the chair nearest the door,” Charles murmurs, and Erik nods thanks.

He manages to catch Charles’s shoulder with his knuckles before he sits down.

“Tea?” Moira asks, politely. 

The answer to that is a rumble, and Erik ducks his head, feels heat prickle under his skin. He tries to smile. “I might have forgotten to eat,” he confesses.

“Goodness,” she says, and then she chuckles, though the sound is perhaps a little bit smaller than he’s used to hearing from her. “You telegraph operators all seem to be cut from the same cloth.”

That makes Erik reach out for her. Her hands are chilly. He squeezes one, briefly, and lets go as soon as she pulls away.

“Food, then,” Charles says, and the words are accompanied by a scrape of chair against floor. “We might as well get started on dinner. We still have a few things to talk about.”

The distracted sound Moira makes in response is almost lost in the shuffle of papers.

Charles’s footsteps move briskly, pause, and then there’s the sound of the front door being opened and closed and locked before they move away.

“Will he be all right, out there, by himself?” Erik asks, for lack of anything to say. He doesn’t want to hear about Shaw - not yet, not if Charles and Moira are planning to keep talking about him. Erik puts the thought off, holds it at bay, any way he can.

The tea, when she nudges it at him, is not the best of distractions, but he’ll take it. The first sip tastes a little bit stale.

“Who, Charles?” Moira asks. Now her words are undercut by the familiar scratch of a pen or a pencil against paper. “Of course he’ll be fine. No reason why he shouldn’t be. There are only a few people in Section 8 who can take him out, if we’re talking about hand-to-hand combat.”

“I suppose we are, now,” Erik says, and he leans forward, interested despite himself. “Can you tell me any stories?”

“I can tell you stories till your ears fall off,” she says, and now she’s laughing, just a little, her voice moving up and down and away and back. 

He listens to her footsteps, walking around the room that they’re in, and she seems to stay mostly within arm’s reach.

“Do you know about Charles’s background? Who and where he was, before he came to Section 8?” she asks, after she returns. Her fingers tap out an idle rhythm on the tabletop.

Erik nods. “Yes. I have to admit, I found the whole thing silly, until he got to the part with the funeral in it.”

“They should have told you that, when you signed up and swore your oaths,” Moira said. “Or - well, if they neglected to let you know this, I can plug that hole for you. The last document in your orientation file, which generally contains the initial information you’ll need to get started with your specific set of tasks within the agency, is a template for a will.”

“As in, _last will and testament_?”

“Yes, though with differences. We are part of the military, in a way - Military Intelligence Directorate, Section 8 - and that affects what we can and can’t put into those templates. Generally, we don’t get to dictate _how_ our bodies and effects will be disposed of, if we happen to die while we are on duty.”

Erik thinks about Janos’s funeral. “Being buried in secret. No letters to next of kin.”

“All effects to be discreetly disposed of. There is an incinerator several miles away from the post that you had been staying at. Yes, that sort of thing.” Moira sounds subdued, again.

“Okay. I think I understand,” Erik says. “Can we go back to Charles now?”

A pause, long enough that he can hear her blow her nose quietly, and then: “Yes, please.” She clears her throat. “You’re asking about stories of Charles and learning hand-to-hand combat - well, there’s just the one, really, in the immediate aftermath of that rescue operation. As soon as he got back to a post that was big enough to have combat training facilities he _demanded_ to be taught how to fight. Emma Frost suggested he would do well as a marksman, but he decided he’d rather get into the thick of it. And the one story of those days is this: he got the stuffing kicked out of him, all day, every day, for weeks that stretched into months. I heard a rumor, eventually, that one of the instructors eventually advised him to stay down or else he’d wake up in the hospital.”

“Charles got up,” Erik guesses.

“He did. He was confined to hospital for a good few weeks.”

“And after that?”

“After that it was like something changed in him,” Moira says. “I came to Section 8 some time after he had begun to best his instructors, and I remember watching - from across the length of the training room, just to be safe about it - as he sparred with one opponent, and then with two, with three, with a whole dozen. He was always walking around with horrendous bruises all over his face.”

“And the same thing happened when he decided to fight with a weapon.” 

“Not quite. That, I heard, was something he picked up from a book. And before you laugh, I’ve seen the book in question. Too esoteric for me, to be honest, but Charles seems to have found something in it. Don’t ask me where he got the stiletto itself; I don’t know, and I’m not really sure I want to know.”

Erik laughs, softly, and after a moment he can hear her join in.

“Thank you,” he says.

“Don’t thank me just yet. I answered your questions so I could ask you questions.”

That makes him snort. “Why am I not surprised.”

“It’s not often one realizes that one is working with a famous musical prodigy, you know.”

“What do you want, Moira,” he asks, chuckling some more.

He hears her moving, so he doesn’t quite startle when she taps the back of his left hand with a fingertip. A quick, deft touch, as if just enough to make sure a single clear note rings in the air. “I played the piano until I was in finishing school. One of my teachers told me my hands were a little bit too small to play certain pieces. I suppose I’m curious, since your hands are quite larger than mine - is it easier to play?”

“My teachers said hand size wasn’t an issue,” he says, and he pretends to run up and down a series of scales on the edge of the table. “For them it was a question of technique and of practice, and, I think, a little judicious cheating,” and this time he can hear her blow out a surprised breath. His hands stop and he puts them down flat on the table, but in his mind the scales gradually acquire complexity and variation, until they begin to transform - 

The music falls away abruptly, as though thrown into the dark bottom of an old well, without even the echoes to mark its passing, when something crashes against the door - and the massive, terrifying noise is sustained and prolonged by the suddenly magnified scrape of a key, fumbling, as if whoever is trying to get in is none too steady on their feet.

Crash. Groan. An entirely too familiar voice.

“ _Not again_ ,” Moira shouts, and Erik hears her footsteps clattering away from him, hears a pause and then the slam of the door. “Charles, what the _fuck_ \- ”

Charles’s voice, when it does come, is distorted and powerful, making Erik think of someone preparing to perform a _Dies Irae_ , and it makes him snap to his feet. “Get on the radio, Erik,” Charles says. “Transmit exactly what I tell you to transmit. Send it in the open, in the clear - I don’t care who’s listening in, I just care about getting that message out.”

“In the clear?” Moira asks. “What happened to you and how bad a situation are we in now?”

“I don’t know. All I know is that they were lying in wait for me. They must have known - Moira, answer me - tell me the absolute truth. _What did you do with Selene_. I asked you that when we got back and you never gave me an answer. You have to tell me. Now.”

Even as Erik scrambles past the chairs and the obstacles between him and his telegraph key he still finds the focus to pay attention to Moira.

“I didn’t kill her, Charles, if that’s what you were thinking - I was well within my rights to and I don’t care what you say or feel about that. But she was alive when I was done with her. I took her to one of the police stations and left her there after I told the woman at the desk that Selene had tried to rob me.”

There’s a frustrated sound. “Then Shaw must have bailed her out,” Charles says, and his voice is little more than an angry growl. “Because his people had been waiting for me. I fought them off, and by that I mean I killed them, and that means we’re going to need help, because if Selene hasn’t tipped Shaw off then those deaths will definitely let him know we’re on the move against him.” A long pause. A determined breath, and then another. It sounds like Charles is trying to calm himself. “Erik, please, start transmitting. Here is the message I want you to send. _Welcome to the dinner party. Try the soup._ Can you repeat the message back to me?”

Erik clenches his hands into fists, relaxes them. He puts his headphones on. He reaches for his instruments. He clears his throat. “The message you want me to send is _Welcome to the dinner party. Try the soup._ Two separate sentences, I assume.”

“You assume correctly. Please send it out on every friendly frequency you know. After that, please stay on the line to listen for responses.”

He nods in Charles’s direction. His hands are steady as he tunes to the first Section 8 station, and then starts keying in the Morse code. Dits and dahs, and the disconcerting lack of any encryption.

He doesn’t stumble through the message. He sends it out twice every time he pauses on an allied frequency. 

He’s halfway up the band, he thinks, when there’s a loud beep in his ears, the signal for an incoming transmission. The next sounds are almost familiar: one of the simple encryption schemes he’d learned at the beginning of his employment by Section 8. 

_P for M._ Coulson himself is on the line. _P for M. Acknowledge._

 _M is here,_ Erik sends, using the same encryption. It’s like playing a specific series of exercises.

Out loud, he says, “I’ve got Coulson responding, Charles.”

“Good,” is the reply.

 _Message received,_ is the next transmission that Erik gets. _Section is scrambling._

He relays that message to the others in the room with him.

“Tell him to send my entire team to me,” Charles says.

“And Irene’s,” Moira adds. “If I can make a request as to which team I’ll be working with now. I’d like to work with her.”

Erik nods, and transmits: _Send CX’s team and -_ he pauses, trying to remember Irene’s identification code - _IA’s, to work with MCT._

_Copy. Wolf is on his way as well._

He blinks. “Wolf?” he asks, out loud.

“That’s Howlett, one of the other operatives,” Moira says. “I don’t much like working with him, but he gets the job done.”

“He’s on his way,” Erik tells her.

He thinks he hears Charles sigh.

 _Special requests?_ Coulson sends.

Erik relays the question. “They’re asking if you have any special requests.”

“My team knows what to do and carry,” Charles says. “And I have my things. I need nothing from the post, but please thank him for asking.”

“Same here,” Moira says after a moment. “Everything I need is already in this place.”

 _None,_ Erik sends.

 _Copy,_ Coulson sends again. _Passing the word to the others. You take care of yourselves out there._

 _Will do the best we can,_ Erik sends.

His hands are sweaty, now, and he wipes them off on his trousers. He listens as the signal drops off in his ears, to be replaced by a familiar static and buzz.

“Erik?” Charles asks, and this time he’s standing close by. “Was there anything else from the post?”

He shakes his head. “They’re passing the word. Coulson says be careful.”

A soft, regrettably brief laugh, gone almost as soon as he can hear it. “I usually am. But sometimes I cannot be. And this is one of those times.”

The next sound that Erik hears is a quiet groan, and he snaps off his headphones and his gear, turns in the direction of Charles’s voice, finds him less than an arm’s length away. Charles’s forearm is tense and uncomfortably damp and sticky. Skin and muscle bunching beneath his grasp, Charles’s warmth and muscles. “Are you all right?”

“I just fought off three women and a very, very large man who looked like a brick wall and punched like a cannon going off right next to me,” is the reply. “I’m bleeding and I’ve been bled upon. I don’t think I could tell you I was all right because you wouldn’t believe a word I said. I certainly wouldn’t believe me.”

Erik growls, and then that sound is followed by a brief flash of surprise, but there’s no time to waste in figuring it out because he’s walking Charles over to where he thinks the nearest chair might be.

Charles helps: “Another two steps backward, then to your right. Here’s the chair. Can I sit down?”

“Yes,” Erik says, and he relinquishes Charles, sits down on the floor. His leg touches the point of Charles’s shoe. “I wish I could help you with the first aid.” He motions to his own unseeing eyes. “I’m a little bit useless for that.”

“But you’re here, and that helps.”

More footsteps, approaching, and when Moira speaks again she sounds as she usually does, calm and knowing. “I don’t even know if you’ve gotten over the bruises you picked up from the other fight.”

“I can still feel them even if I can’t see them any more,” Charles says.

“If this happens again it’ll be straight to the hospital with you. I wouldn’t let you cross the damn threshold, no matter how bad a state you were in.”

“That’s not a question of _if_ any more. It’s a question of _when_.”

Moira sighs. “True. Now hold still. Shirt off. Broken bones?”

“I don’t know,” Charles says. “Burns like fury up my left side though.”

Erik listens to every hiss and every quiet groan, and sits helplessly at Charles’s feet.

///

Charles wakes up with a start.

Or perhaps waking up is too kind a term for it. He is caught in a moment between being aware and being unconscious, and there is a weight around his hand that he may or may not recognize. Either way, it’s something he doesn’t want to let go of.

Something creaks, and he looks up, and it takes him a few moments to understand what he is looking at.

There is a chair wedged in under the knob on the front door, and that chair is tipped backwards on two legs.

Next to that, the chair that Moira is sitting in is tipped back in precisely the same way.

How she can sleep in such a precarious position, Charles can’t exactly fathom - and that’s _without_ factoring in the cut-down rifle across her lap.

As he watches, Moira yawns, blinks, and then opens her eyes.

He looks back at her, and she smiles. “You need to rest,” she whispers. “We’ll work out a rota later.”

“Promise me,” Charles whispers back, “you’ll wake me back up in another four hours or so.”

“I might. If I think you’ve recovered. Until then, sleep. We need you at your best.”

Then she raises her finger to her lips and tilts her head to the side, briefly - small movements, neither of which will knock her out of her strange equilibrium.

He follows the direction of her gaze, and his eyes fall upon Erik, who is sitting up on the couch next to him, and who is sleeping soundly.

The other thing about Erik is that he’s slumped forward just a little, tilted at an awkward angle, and that might be because he only has one arm crossed over his chest.

The other arm is stretched out in Charles’s direction, and that hand is clasped carefully around his.

Erik is holding his hand, and Charles doesn’t want him to let go.

He glances at Moira, who looks like she’s gone back to sleep. At the very least, her eyes are closed and her breathing even. 

Carefully, hesitantly, Charles edges closer to Erik.

When he’s tucked in next to the taller man, the two of them touching from shoulders to hips to knees, Erik lets out a quiet sound that makes Charles think of satisfaction - and, impossibly, he tries to press closer.

Hard to tell now if Erik’s awake or asleep. Charles will take it either way.

He carefully lifts the hand that Erik is holding gently and tenaciously on to, so he can look at Erik’s hand. He realizes he’s become familiar with the movements of that hand, since he’s almost always been watching Erik at work, whether work means the radio or the piano.

Charles thinks back to the cut-off performance of the _Goldberg Variations_. A still afternoon in which the echoes of the guns that had been fired at the funeral had lingered for an almost unbearably long time. He had imagined the echoes and the ghostly not-quite-silence that had lingered around him, mile after mile even as he left the post far behind, knowing that Erik had stopped playing as soon as Charles was reminded of his departure.

Here is that hand around his, Erik’s left hand. He’d been struck by how Erik could always seem to find his way on the keyboard, never really fishing around for the correct position. Granted he doesn’t know any other players and has no real inkling of how they act when facing a keyboard, and he definitely hasn’t been able to watch Erik play for anything resembling an extended period of time. But he can’t shake the connection between Erik and precision - he keeps seeing Erik as someone who doesn’t need to see the keys to know where he has to be.

He thinks about Erik’s first few weeks at the Section 8 post, when he’d just passed the recruitment examinations and was learning Morse code in, it seemed, practically every waking moment. He thinks about Erik’s hands on telegraph key and tuning knob, and he thinks about the concentration writ large in Erik’s face - a concentration that seems to stay with him, even now, even when he’s supposed to be asleep.

Charles isn’t really thinking when he strokes his fingertip carefully over Erik’s skin, over the knuckles that almost show through. The drag and give of Erik is strangely hypnotic, and he can’t help himself: he does it again, and then once more, and then he has to make himself stop.

He has no idea if Erik is open to receiving such overtures, or if Erik is open to receiving such overtures from him.

All he knows is that he feels unsettled - in a way that makes him lightheaded and reckless and strangely happy - when Erik rumbles and turns toward him, shockingly wide awake, and says, in the quietest tone Charles has ever heard him produce, “Don’t stop.”

He doesn’t think, just obeys, and Erik’s rumble deepens into a hum that sounds pleased.

No, more than that, Charles thinks.

He thinks Erik sounds content.

And as if to assuage his earlier doubts Erik’s hand wraps more firmly around his, and more gently at the same time. Erik’s hand, large and warm and strong. He can’t help but hold on. He can’t help but stay right where he is. Erik’s grip on him is too compelling. He couldn’t leave now even if someone put a gun to his head.

Erik starts humming again. The melody is now a little bit more familiar. Charles remembers it from the one night they’d spent at his own flat - the night Erik spent sleeping and Charles spent staring.

The music is powerful and swooping and Erik nods as he goes, as if he were keeping time, and when he stops humming Charles feels like something’s been carved out of him, a silence that is not entirely unwelcome, but that yearns for the next measures, for the next sweep of song.

“I think I’ve found a name for that - that thing I’m writing,” Erik whispers, and listening to him speak now makes Charles shiver almost as much as his humming did.

Charles swallows, and says, just as quietly, “Tell me about it if you like, or keep humming, or - I don’t really know what you want to do now, but you should know, I’m staying right here.”

The response to that is a brief dazzling flash of a bright and pleased smile, and Charles has to smile back, helplessly, because he can’t stop himself, because he can’t deny Erik this response, which he must feel, one way or another.

After a moment, Erik says, softly, “I think - I think I’ll call it _blue_. Just that. It’s a name that is simple and easy to remember. People can turn their brains inside out trying to find out what exactly is blue about music, about notes and rests and key signatures. To me, the music is _blue_ and that’s all that really matters.”

“Blue,” Charles says, and he touches the corner of his own eye. “Why does the music seem blue to you? What is the connection between the color and the melody?”

“I just keep getting the impression,” Erik says, slowly, quietly, “of blue skies, and blue nights, and blue shadows, when I’m around you.”

The words hit Charles like a lightning strike, like pure energy running up and down his nerves and veins, till his very blood must be afire, till his very senses must be twisted upon themselves.

“I remember blue,” Erik continues, and he pinches the bridge of his nose above his sunglasses, as though he is oblivious, as if he doesn’t know the impact his words are having on Charles. “The sky outside my window was always such a strange shifting blue, in the last moments before a storm. And storms are dangerous, and they are often needed, and they are unstoppable.”

He stops, and he shakes his head. “I’m sorry. It must sound silly, applying all these ideas to a little piece of music, and then talking about that little piece of music to you.”

Charles finds his voice, but only after he swallows - once, twice, convulsively. “I think I would rather listen to you talk about things like this, which are far from being inconsequential, than that I spend my time listening to long rambling speeches made by people, in which they think that their words are important because they themselves are important.”

That gets him a raised eyebrow, and a quiet laugh. “Now you are just humoring me.”

“I really am not,” Charles says, daring to put his other hand over Erik’s holding his, and squeezing very gently. “And I’m not trying to flatter you, either, so that you’ll keep writing _blue_.”

“Then why are you encouraging me?”

“The kind of listening I normally do is dangerous, and makes me feel like being angry all the time,” Charles tells him, honestly. “The kind of listening I normally do involves people planning to do terrible things to other people, for the sake of power - and if you’re looking for something truly inconsequential, it’s power. It’s temporary, and it’s nothing but a burden - and yet people still spill rivers of blood for it. I would rather listen to the wind in the trees. I would rather sit inside and watch a storm sweep through. I would rather listen to music.”

“Even if it’s just a little thing, written because of you?”

“You’re teasing me,” Charles says, laughing very softly. “You keep saying that the music was written for me, or because of me. Why shouldn’t I want to listen to it? Why can’t I be curious?”

“As I said earlier, I don’t know why I keep associating that color with you,” Erik says. “For all I know you don’t even like blue. How am I supposed to know?”

Charles takes a deep breath, and squeezes Erik’s hand gently in both of his own, but only for a moment, before he relinquishes it, reluctantly.

Erik starts, raises both eyebrows this time. “Charles?”

He doesn’t answer Erik, at least not directly. “Give me your hands, please.”

He watches as Erik turns in his direction, as he holds out both hands, so trusting. Those strong and sturdy hands, graceful even as they’re held out blankly in mid-air. 

He guides them carefully to his face - and he shivers, and knows Erik feels it, when those fingertips make contact with the flush in his skin.

“Is this you?” When Erik speaks, he sounds rough and strangely undone. 

His touch is infinitely gentle. Charles can’t help but close his eyes and lean in.

He holds his breath, waiting for Erik’s touch to move up - but Erik takes his time, carefully touching Charles’s cheeks. Fingers slipping against the sensitive skin behind Charles’s ears. Charles only has a moment to think about how grateful he is that Erik can’t see his blush - before he realizes, too late, that Erik can _feel_ that heat, rising in his skin, and radiating powerfully.

“You must have a reason,” Erik says, still rough and still unsure, even as he skims a thumb over the bridge of Charles’s nose, “why you’ve invited me to touch you like this.”

“My eyes,” Charles says, and obediently he closes his eyes when Erik’s thumbs press against the outer corners, against his temples. 

“What about your eyes,” Erik asks.

“I have blue eyes,” Charles says.

Erik’s fingertips freeze on his skin.

///

“I have blue eyes.”

Charles has just said that.

Charles has just told him what color his eyes were.

Erik freezes, shocked. 

It’s the kind of shock that comes with finding good news, he thinks. Maybe winning the Prokofiev Prize could come close. Maybe successfully navigating a flight of stairs, coming and then going, in the complete and utter darkness of his current condition could compare. Maybe the surge of relief that he’d felt after realizing that he was still alive could make him feel the same way.

Charles has blue eyes, and Erik has been associating Charles with the color blue almost from their first meeting, with the idea of a blue-dark storm hammering rain down onto the pavement, onto the street.

The words come to him, eventually, broken whispers falling almost involuntarily from his lips. “I’m glad,” he says. 

He immediately thinks he’s said something nonsensical. “Sorry,” he says, still touching Charles’s eyes, his crow’s-feet, the strongly defined lines of his eyebrows.

“No need,” Charles says, and how has Erik not noticed the hitch in his breathing yet? How has Erik not noticed that Charles is leaning _forward_ , into his touch? 

“Are you - ” Erik swallows around the burr in his throat, the emotions fighting their way up to the surface at last so he can hear them and be pierced by them, leaving him feeling like a plucked string on a long, long sustain that threads into trembling silent vibration. “Is this all right? Am I not intruding?”

“Please intrude all you want,” Charles says - and then the words keep coming. “I’ve been watching your hands, wondering about them, and now you’re touching me with them, and I don’t want you to stop.”

“Tell me,” Erik says, because that’s all he can say, because he didn’t expect to hear the words. 

“You always know where to put your hands - on a piano’s keyboard, on a tuning knob, on your telegraph key. On your notebook. I remember watching you trying to write music - ”

“That music was different from _blue_ ,” Erik says. “But yes, it was still music for which I had you in mind.”

“Every time you say that,” Charles says, “I feel like you’re staring at me.”

“I wish that I could do that,” Erik says. “But I think that there might be something better than just staring at you.”

“What is it?”

“This,” Erik says, and, hardly daring, he moves one hand away from Charles’s face, drops it into his lap - his fingertips are still tingling. 

He moves the other hand up, just a little, so his fingertips are brushing Charles’s hairline.

“Erik?”

“Don’t move,” Erik says.

He holds his breath, and strokes downward. Gently, gently, he doesn’t dare push, or he’ll hurt Charles.

Here is the furrow between Charles’s eyebrows, the skin smoothing out at his touch. Here is the strange shape of Charles’s nose, crooked, as if the bones had been broken and reset, and more than just once. Here is the indent of the philtrum, with its softly prominent ridges, warmed by Charles’s breath. 

Before he touches Charles’s mouth he hesitates. “May I?”

“Please,” Charles says.

Down, he pulls his hand down, just a little.

His fingertips catch on chapped and cracked skin and he softens his touch just a little bit more, as though he were playing a series of very short, very rapid notes against Charles’s mouth. He traces the bowed outline of the upper lip, and the rounded fullness of the lower.

As he lingers on the warmth of Charles’s lips he can feel them stretch out into a smile, and he smiles in response. “I think you might be beautiful,” he says, breathlessly.

That gets him a soft laugh, and an unexpected surprise: 

Charles’s hand is firm around Erik’s wrist, just below the fingertips that are still lingering on Charles’s face.

Erik swallows again. “Yes? Should I move - ”

“Only if you’re not moving away,” Charles says. “You can move closer. You can stay where you are. Just - don’t leave. Not yet. This feels so good. I don’t understand why you think I might be beautiful.”

“I just do,” Erik says, and he succumbs to the pull between them.

He touches his forehead to Charles’s.

Charles sighs, and tilts up into Erik, and his breath washes warmly over Erik’s mouth.

Erik freezes, once again, and this time he feels the shiver that runs through Charles, a shiver that catches at him and pulls him forward, so he’s falling into Charles.

A kiss.

One simple touch, but it’s like power, like triumphant chords, like a soaring melodious cry, and it thrums and rumbles through Erik and makes him press closer. He can’t think of doing anything else. There is only this touch, and Charles’s presence.

Charles gasps, softly, and his grip on Erik’s wrist tightens and comes loose, and Erik catches that hand and holds on as tightly as he can - and then, somehow, Charles presses closer.

Charles opens his mouth - just a little - and when Erik groans, tries to surge forward, he’s caught by Charles, who moves into him, gentle and inexorable and in that moment it’s easy to give over, it’s easy to fall, and Charles’s hands are welcome weights on his shoulders and he’s breathless, he’s dizzy, he’s shaking from head to toe and he wishes the night would never end, that morning would never come.

He’s lost, here, in Charles’s kiss.

And it’s a loss of a different kind when Charles smiles against his mouth, as if in apology, and pulls gently away.

Erik pulls a shaky breath into his lungs, and holds on to Charles’s hand, still touching him, still connecting the two of them.

He goes, when Charles takes his other hand and leads it back to flushed cheeks. “Can you feel that?” Charles asks, softly. “I’m warm. I’m here.”

“You’re here,” Erik echoes, “but for how long?” 

Outside he can hear the murmurings of the world as it comes awake. The night is fading, and he can hear it, in the distant notes of early birdsong, in footsteps walking a solitary path upon the street.

Charles’s response, when it comes, is sober. “I wish I could answer that question,” he says. “It’s been a long time since I could think of an answer to that question. I’ve been living day to day for so long. It is, unfortunately, a necessary risk. It is part of my life now. It is part of what I do.”

“And now, it’s part of mine,” Erik says. “I do not go out into the field as you and Moira and the rest of your team do, but I, too, am living on borrowed time.” He thinks of Janos and bows his head.

“Yes.” Charles sounds sad and resigned and determined anyway. “I know. I wish that I didn’t.”

“What are you planning to do now?”

There’s a pause, and there’s a quiet yawn from nearby, that sounds like Moira. “There’s not much we can do,” Charles says, and the words become more urgent, though he’s still speaking quietly and gently, as if for Erik’s ears alone. “Not until Section 8 sees fit to respond to yesterday’s message.”

Erik bows his head, just a little. “They cannot drag their feet. As you yourself said, the situation is volatile. It could change in the next few hours. In the next few days.”

“I trust Section 8 - to a certain extent,” Charles says. “If we do not get any responses today, I will resort to more drastic measures.”

“Can you tell me about these more drastic measures?”

“Not now, and I wish I could. But you know that we operate on a need-to-know basis.”

Erik nods, reluctantly. “Yes. I learned about it in the first few days of training, and then Jean and Betsy tried to hammer it further in.” 

Charles makes a sound that might be a laugh, though it is brief and strange and slightly distorted by the weight of his words. “Were they successful?”

Erik shrugs. “Maybe it took, in a way. I haven’t told anyone about the cipher - ciphers - that I have to use when I’m communicating with Section 8. Though perhaps that might be because half the time I have to struggle to remember them?”

“It’s not the best method of keeping secrets, but it will do for now.” 

Erik nods, once, when Charles squeezes his hand.

Another yawn, and an unexpected _thump_. A quiet sneeze.

Charles snorts, still quietly, and Erik starts at his words. “Hello, Moira,” Charles says, “sleep well?”

“Ugh,” Moira says. “The whole _point_ of me sitting tipped up like this was so that I’d fall out of the damn chair if I breathed the wrong way!”

“You’ve gotten to be quite good at keeping still in a position like that,” Charles says. “You got comfortable. Your brain obviously thought you could rest.”

“Ugh,” she says again. 

“I’m sorry,” Erik says, “what position are we talking about - ”

“The one in which I was sleeping on a chair that was tipped up onto its back legs,” Moira tells him. “I fell asleep in a chair that was teetering off-balance. I need to find some other way of staying awake.”

“Not important,” Charles says, suddenly, after a brief pause. “Not now, anyway. As I said yesterday - we have bigger things to worry about.”

Reluctantly, carefully, Erik lets Charles’s hand go, as he remembers the radio and his own tasks. “Is there anything,” he says as he gets to his feet, “that you want me to listen for in particular?”

“There’s no point in asking you to listen for particular messages, since you’re listening to code most of the time,” is Charles’s response. “Listen instead for the frequency of transmissions. More traffic? Less? The information might give the codebreakers some clues as to what to focus on.”

Erik nods, and starts across the room.

It’s not until he’s sitting down at the familiar table, in the familiar chair, that he hears Charles say, once again, “I’m here, Erik.”

That makes him turn partway and say, in the direction of Charles’s voice, “You’re here, yes. And so am I.”


	13. Chapter 13

“You’ll excuse the observation,” Moira says two days later, “but this place is a powder keg.”

Charles shrugs, one-shouldered. He hopes it looks sufficiently insouciant. “Yes. But a powder keg that will not blow up here.”

“And just how are you going to accomplish something like that?”

“Oh, I’ll think of something, I’m sure.”

In fact, he’s already made and discarded half a dozen plans since Moira last fussed over his injuries, and since the latest and final arrivals showed up: Irene’s team. Rachel is whispering to Betsy and Jean in the opposite corner of the room from where he is currently standing. Kitty is helping Sean count magazines for the various guns that they all have, which are stacked on one of the kitchen counters. Irene herself is in the kitchen, waving a tea cup around in a reckless manner, which does not seem to bother Howlett at all as he works through a stack of sandwiches.

Their voices rise and fall, and every once in a while Moira has to tell one group or another to keep the noise down.

If they had all been perfect strangers to him Charles would never have stayed - he’d have ducked out the door at the first opportunity.

But the truth is that these people are his friends, and if they’re not his friends then they’re his comrades, and he’s run with them and bled with and for them. They are his allies; they are all, to the last person, soldiers just as he is.

And then there’s Erik, who is sitting at the radio, as calm as though there is no one in the room but himself.

Charles thinks about crossing the room to sit with Erik, to snatch a quiet moment or two, but no sooner does he take the first step than Erik hisses, startled, and sits bolt upright. “Quiet,” he says, and the voice is low and cutting and commanding and everyone obeys him without hesitation.

Flash of his hand working the telegraph key, and then, Erik says, “Message incoming from Emma Frost, please stand by.” 

There are gaps between the words, and Charles looks at the radio, looks at Erik’s hands, and he crosses the room to Erik’s side, and doesn’t even notice the smiles, the looks of understanding, as both Moira and Betsy chivvy the others out of his way.

He touches Erik’s shoulder, very lightly. Just one fingertip. He doesn’t want to risk distracting him too much. He’s received messages before, and he knows that Erik will have to decipher them before he relays them, and he doesn’t want to break the man’s concentration.

Charles tells himself he’s imagining that Erik is leaning into him - up until Erik’s shoulder makes contact with Charles. Erik is warm, and that warmth soaks gently and gradually into Charles’s clothes, down to the skin. Pressure from their point of contact, though Charles wisely doesn’t lean in any further than he is already doing.

He’s watched Erik sit and stand and play the piano and work at the radio and walk around, and there is something arresting about his posture, the specific way he holds his shoulders and his head. A certain tension coupled with a certain readiness to swerve, to move out of the way of whatever obstacle he happens to come upon. Charles thinks it might have something to do with Erik’s reliance on his cane, and when it is impractical to use the cane, on his hands. 

In any case, he’s close enough to watch the expressions on Erik’s face fleeting responses, the movement of his head and of his eyebrows and of his mouth as he, presumably, receives the message and works to decipher it.

_Click._

Erik nods for the last time, and takes his hands off his instruments, carefully massages the joints and knuckles of one with the other, then switches hands.

“Message from Emma Frost,” he says once again, and he touches Charles’s hand with his, and says, “Excuse me.”

Charles watches Erik turn carefully around, watches him listen for the others’ presence. Erik clears his throat. When he speaks, the words are clear and clarion and beautifully pronounced. 

“Latest intelligence from Section 8’s telegraph people and from the codebreakers. This concerns the wedding of Sebastian Shaw to Kathryn Worthington. They have managed to find a copy of the guest list. Section 8 thinks that there will be four, possibly five, high-profile targets. There is still no word on whether the president and the prime minister will be attending - both have been invited, but there has been no record of their responses as of this time.

“Alternatively, Emma Frost thinks one or both of them might have accepted, but perhaps under false names.”

“The only smart thing they could have done,” Howlett sneers, “is refuse to attend. Why are they going at all? They know the name Sebastian Shaw. They should know they can’t trust the man.”

“They may be attending not because of the man, but because of the woman,” Jean says. “We built a dossier on Kathryn Worthington. Her family has always had ties to the government of Providence. Her mother came within a hair’s-breadth of the presidency a few years back. As for the prime minister, we’re still investigating.”

“And we know that the president went to Kathryn Worthington’s first wedding,” Kitty adds. “They almost asked him to give her away.”

“So it makes sense that he was invited again, that’s all,” Betsy says. “It doesn’t really explain why he’s going at all.”

“Let’s say it’s a mix of A, he wants to, and B, he needs to,” Moira says. “The Worthingtons are his allies. Except that there’s a problem in his attending, this time. It will make people think that he is favoring Kathryn over her son. We know that Warren Worthington III is fighting for control of the family businesses.”

Erik sighs, quietly. “Will you not let me see him?”

“It would be a good thing if you could: Worthington might have seen fit to confide in you, since you mentioned that you were, in a way, friends,” Moira says. “But you can’t. Not now. It’s too risky.”

“Because of Selene, and therefore because of Shaw,” Erik says. “It always comes back to him, doesn’t it.”

“Which is why we’re going to have to do something,” Charles says. He squeezes Erik’s shoulder, then takes a step away, and puts his hands in his pockets to think. “We do have to move quickly, however. There’s not much time remaining before the happy rites. Was there anything else in the message?”

“Ah. Yes.” Erik rubs his hands together for warmth. “Addendum from Coulson: We have a dedicated group of listeners now. He mentioned Melinda and two or three others. He recommends we keep this set hot and running at all times, in case there is new information to be sent or received.”

“Then we’ll work out a rota, too,” Irene says, and both Sean and Betsy nod. “Lucky we brought a second set of instruments, we can use that if we need to work on anything else - Moira, where do I set up?”

“Good question,” Moira says, and Charles watches her cross the room to talk to Irene. Jean and Rachel join that knot and within minutes, they’re muttering furiously at each other. He can’t make out any of the words - but from the way Erik’s head is tilted and he’s smiling, almost amused, he can.

Charles asks him. “What are they talking about?” 

“Mostly, Moira’s getting scolded for setting up in such small quarters. There’s just barely enough room for three to work in here, including the telegraph operator. Apparently she was offered a different set of rooms?”

“I don’t know,” Charles says. 

“You two make a good team,” someone says from nearby.

Charles raises his eyebrow in Howlett’s direction. “You’ve been introduced, I hope.”

“No. Good to meet you, Lehnsherr,” Howlett says. “You’re damn good with the radio.”

“Thank you. It’s good to meet you as well. Howlett. Is that really your name?” Erik asks.

“It’s the one I have.”

“I see.” Erik tilts his head, as if listening once again.

Charles looks around. The others have gone back to their interrupted tasks. “Is there something you need?”

“I wish I could read the Worthington dossiers,” Erik says. “As it is, someone will have to read them to me. And that’s going to take time that no one currently has.”

“Charles has some free time,” Howlett says.

Charles frowns at him. It doesn’t seem to have any effect on the man’s slowly widening smirk. “Howlett.”

“What?”

“Don’t you have anything to be working on, yourself? You’ve brought too much of an arsenal as usual. It’s your task to care for all of those weapons.”

“Including the rifle that your Jean prefers, I’m not hearing any thanks from you for that.”

Charles rolls his eyes. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. And I’ve finished with the whole lot. Believe it or not. So I can ride herd over this group for the time being.” Howlett turns serious, however, as he looks back in Erik’s direction. “I hope there’s something in your head that could help us figure out how that family works. I think they’re going to be the key to the puzzle.”

“I take it this goes beyond the question of, _why_ is Sebastian Shaw marrying Kathryn Worthington?” Charles asks.

“Other than that she’s rich, she’s got ties to the government and to a good chunk of the local economy, _and_ that she’s on bad terms with her son?”

“I don’t know anything about her,” Erik says carefully. “I know her son.”

“Then talk about him. Tell Charles what you know.”

Charles nods. “All right. There might be something useful there. You’ll have to tell me more than just about your conversations, Erik - you’ll have to describe what wasn’t said, what you thought he was feeling.”

He watches as Erik nods, once. “I will do my best. When can we start?”

“Now’s good,” Howlett tells him. “Not much time left to gather information. Soon it’ll be time to act.”

“All right,” Charles says, and he goes to the stack of files next to Jean’s chair, carefully digging through the folders. He finds the Warren Worthington III file quickly. “Who has the Kathryn Worthington dossier?”

“Oh, sorry, here,” Betsy says. “I was marking up some of the earlier documents.”

“Erik and I are going to work on them.”

She nods, and hands the file over. “Good luck. I hope he can help us, too.”

He goes back to Erik and to Howlett, and has to grin, because now that Erik is standing up he actually towers over Howlett by a good few inches. “Everything set?” he asks. 

Erik turns in his direction immediately. “I’m ready. Where do you want to work?”

“No one’s using the spare bedroom right now,” Howlett suggests. “That way you’re still within reach.”

Erik nods. “I think I know where it is. Will that suit, Charles?”

Charles frowns one more time at Howlett, and then follows Erik as he starts moving across the room, following the tapping of his cane. “I think it should. Provided there’s not too much dust or grease.”

So Erik leads him into the spare bedroom. There is a stray cobweb in the corner of the ceiling almost directly over the door. The coverlet is a faded celadon color, edged with a thin border of plain white lace. 

He watches as Erik feels his way up the length of the bed, stopping just below the pillows. Erik nods, sets his cane aside, and sits carefully down, and the mattress gives way under him. He takes off his shoes, then swings himself into position, so the pillows are supporting his back. He sits cross-legged, and he is wearing dark gray socks.

Charles asks, “Comfortable?”

“Mostly. You’re not sitting down yet?”

“I was waiting for you.” And Charles suits deeds to words. He sits down at the foot of the bed, and spreads the dossiers out between him and Erik. “Can you hear me?”

“Easily.” Erik smiles, and his face is turned away from Charles, towards the window in the opposite wall. 

Outside, the dark blues of the dusk sky are fading into the deeper purplish-black of early evening.

“I tell myself I can always hear you, you know,” Erik says, and that makes Charles look up from the introductory pages of the Warren Worthington III dossier. 

“Tell me?” Charles asks after a moment, and he hopes he sounds inviting. He can’t help but lean forward, can’t help but want to hang on Erik’s words.

“Just - there’s something in your voice that feels like I need to pay attention.” Erik shrugs, makes a face, looks briefly frustrated for a moment. “I don’t have many words to talk about it. I express myself better in music. I haven’t finished _blue_ yet - I don’t think I’ll get a chance to, not if we’re getting down to the last days of work on this whole Worthington business - but I hope that after this, after we’re done, you’ll come and hear me play the whole thing. I - you should. I wrote it for you, after all.”

“I’ll do it,” Charles promises, “assuming we win, assuming we succeed.”

Erik nods. “Because if we fail we could be - what? On the run? Captured?”

“I don’t honestly know. We could die,” Charles says, matter-of-fact.

“Yes.” Erik’s face darkens, briefly. “So if we win - I’ll finish the piece. I’ll work with an orchestra. I’ll go on stage. And I’ll perform _blue_ for you. It can be a special show. One night only, just for you.”

He looks so determined and grim and earnest all at once that Charles can’t help but reach out to him - he stretches across the length of the bed, reaches for Erik’s hand.

The grimness in Erik’s face vanishes as soon as Charles touches him, as soon as he puts both hands around Charles’s.

Reluctantly, Charles sighs and pulls away. “We won’t get to that stage until we win here. So, let’s get this started.”

“Yes,” Erik says again.

“You want to focus on Warren’s file, you said.”

“I’ll tell you everything I can remember,” Erik says, “starting from the moment I met him. He says he got my name from one of his friends from school. The woman - her name was Amiko Kobayashi - is herself a musician of some merit, though the piano in her house was not for her use but for her son’s.

“My relationship with Warren Worthington III did not begin with the piano in his mother’s house. There were other pianos, originally decorative fixtures, in some of his other properties. But he claimed that he was thinking of being a sponsor for people like Kobayashi and others, so he needed someone to regularly maintain those pianos for him.

“He has been a client of mine for about two years now; I am familiar with the addresses of some of his homes.”

Charles consults a list in the dossier. “We know of eight residences listed solely under his name.”

Erik raises an eyebrow. “Eight. I see. I’ve been to three, not counting the mansion that Kathryn Worthington intends to occupy. I didn’t even start going there until a few weeks before you came looking for me.”

“Give me the addresses of those three residences, please?”

Erik answers readily, speedily, and Charles nods as he finds each address in the list. “We’ve got all of them here. Where is the mansion that you mentioned?”

“In one of the northern suburbs,” Erik says, and gives him the rest of the address.

Charles raises his eyebrows. “I’ve been there; that’s where I captured Selene.” He squints at the list in his hands. When he finds it he’s more than halfway down, and there is a notation in Betsy’s handwriting next to that entry: _House originally to be given directly to WWIII - childhood home - mother packed up and took WWIII with her - house effectively abandoned until news of KW engagement -_

“It says here,” Charles says, “that the house was going to be Warren Worthington III’s property.”

He watches as Erik shrugs, shoulders moving with concise elegance. “All he said was that he lived there for a short time, when he was a boy.”

“I see. Now I really wish we could send you back for a conversation. But the timing won’t work and I will absolutely not expose you to the risk of being spotted by our opponents.”

“You could come with me,” Erik offers.

He thinks about it. “You’d be in considerable danger if you went out on your own. Doubly so if I were with you.” When he moves he can still feel the lingering after-effects of the fight he’d had with Shaw’s other thugs. “Remember, they know my face, and they’re watching for me. They did a very good job of beating me up last time. I am - trying to avoid a repeat performance, at least until I absolutely have to fight again.”

Worry flits across Erik’s frown, only briefly visible. It makes Charles wish he could reach out for Erik once again. It makes him wish they could sit side by side. 

But before he can move, Erik lifts his head, steeples his fingers, and says, “Tell me about that dossier now, please.”

He blinks, refocuses on the folder full of papers, and clears his throat. “Yes. Excuse me. The subject of this dossier is Warren Worthington III: currently head of the Worthington family business enterprises. The family’s portfolio includes holdings in the sectors of real estate, construction, shipping, warehousing, and general trade - ”

///

Erik startles out of sleep when something hits the table right next to his hands. It’s not the clarity of the sound that wakes him up, but rather the vibration that travels up into his skin, that trembles in his bones, that leaves him wanting to move carefully away from whatever it is that is now next to him.

The sound, too, makes him think of finality, of silence.

“No need to worry,” a woman’s voice says next to him. From the rasp in her voice, as though she either spends a lot of time talking or spends a lot of time staying silent, he thinks it might be Rachel. “You’re pretty safe with me. I’m not like Howlett; he doesn’t care who’s at the table with him, if he happens to be using that table to clean his weapons. I put a knife down next to you. But it’s in its sheath.”

“Is it just a coincidence,” Erik asks quietly, mindful of the others who might still be trying to snatch a few minutes of sleep, “that I keep running into Section 8 people who are over-protective of their weapons? I smelled something strange, the one time I was in Emma Frost’s office, something greasy and heavy, and then while I was talking to Howlett yesterday I figured out that it must have been something related to his guns.”

“Gun oil?”

“Yes. I wonder, then, how many guns she was keeping in her quarters. The smell was so pervasive.”

“Emma Frost likes shotguns,” Rachel offers after a moment. There is a brief levity, a little lightness, there and quickly gone, in her voice. “She taught me how to use them. I’m a fair good shot with them now, but I’ll still need a little more training, I think. I still hesitate over the trigger, sometimes.”

“And your knives?” Erik asks, tilting his head to better hear her.

“Knife, just the one, that’s all I have. Yes. I’m not good with it either. But it’s good to be armed, and it’s even better to be armed with something that can be easily concealed. And a knife can be useful, too, even if we’re not talking about a combat situation per se. You often need a blade in a situation in which first aid is needed, you see. Cut away clothes, cut bandages to the right size, open packages of sterile things.”

Erik smiles. “The only way I use a knife is - in the kitchen.”

“And that is more than important,” Rachel says, and this time she almost sounds like she could be laughing. A very small sound, self-contained. “If we couldn’t eat we couldn’t fight. I hear very good things about you in the kitchen, Erik. Moira told me about the sandwiches.”

He can feel his cheeks heating, a little. He ducks his head. “It’s another way of helping. Of keeping morale up. Hers and mine and - everyone’s, I suppose.”

“And don’t think it’s not appreciated,” a new voice says. This one is familiar. The air moves, a chair creaks, and there’s a physical presence sitting down next to him. Betsy. He identifies her by the way she speaks, by the cadence of her words. “Though I remember the other thing better.”

“Other thing?” Rachel asks. She sounds curious. But even that, Erik thinks, makes him think of tucked-in edges and rolled-under seams.

“Erik’s a pianist,” Betsy says. “And he’s a damn good one.”

“That explains so much about your hands,” Rachel tells him. “I thought you were someone who did some kind of manual labor. I just didn’t have the time to figure out what it was exactly. Do you still play?”

He nods. “Sometimes. When I’m not listening to encrypted Morse code.”

“He played something really spectacular the last time he got his hands on a piano,” Betsy says. “What was it called again, Erik?”

He ducks his head, a little. “The _Goldberg Variations_.” Almost in spite of himself he puts his hands down flat on the table. He takes a deep breath. He raises his fingers into playing position. All he hears is the quiet strike of his skin against the hard wooden surface, but in his mind he can also remember the sarabande, the ebb and flow of the variations. “I wish I could have played it through, the first time.”

“You were distracted, and that was something we understood.”

“If we get out of this one alive,” he says in Betsy’s direction, “I’ll go through all of the variations, from the beginning to the end, and all the way back to the first theme. So you can hear the whole thing.”

“I’d like that very much,” Betsy says.

“Am I invited, too?” Rachel asks.

“You and everyone in this place,” Erik says.

He can hear the quiet laugh, and he can hear her turn back to her task. Now that he’s listening for her, he can also make out the rest of her movements: the soft whine of the knife being drawn, and the cry of stone against that metal.

“If you need anything sharpened, Betsy,” Rachel says.

“Thanks, but I don’t really work with knives,” is the reply. “I was up the other night working on all the guns Jean and I brought here, though.”

“Did you talk to Irene about her handgun? She says it hasn’t been working properly. It nearly blew up while she was in the middle of an operation, some two months ago.”

Betsy sounds both curious and unsettled at the same time. “Do I actually want to know?”

“I can tell you the story, and you can tell me to stop.”

“Let me go and get the gun from her and you can walk me through it. It’s a good thing Jean convinced me to bring my kit, though it’s incredibly heavy to be carrying around.”

Erik keeps going through the _Goldberg Variations_ , listening to the notes as he rehearses them, over and over in his mind - and he’s sliding from the conclusion of the twenty-eighth and into the beginning of the twenty-ninth when there’s an unholy noise in the room.

He claps his hands to his ears. It doesn’t block out the atonality of that wail, which rises and rises until he has to grit his teeth, until he has to try and choke out the words: “Please make it stop!”

“Sean!” Moira shouts. “Are you all right?”

Dimly, Erik can hear the sounds of a scuffle, of something or someone being forced to move, and then there’s a loud slapping sound and silence. Blessed silence. It falls upon him like a physical blow, and he welcomes it, and he listens to the sound of the blood rushing in his ears for several long moments, before he can bring himself to pry his hands away from his head.

“What happened to Sean?” he asks, and no one answers, and he gets up and reaches for his cane by its loop, and he listens for the lingering echoes of that infernal sound, and through it, the urgent whispering of several human voices.

Forward, forward, and he navigates around the scattered chairs, the things fallen to the floor - one shaped like a book, and he finds the pen next to it just in time; another that might be a weapon if the tapered shape is anything to go by - and the bulbous shape of an overstuffed sack.

“Sean, talk to me,” Moira says.

The answer, when it comes, is faint and dazed and familiar. “No fucking idea - it was just something that appeared on every channel I could tune to. Like the worst noise anyone has ever heard or invented or had nightmares about.”

Erik frowns, sidesteps the shape of someone’s foot or leg, and heads towards Sean’s instruments.

He picks up the headset, takes a deep breath, turns the radio on, looks for one of the Section 8 frequencies.

“What are you doing - Erik, please, get away from that! We don’t know if it’s safe - ”

He holds up a hand. As if from a distance he hears Moira grinding her teeth.

When he doesn’t find the telegraph key in its usual place he taps carefully over the rest of the table - but he doesn’t find what he’s looking for until he follows a thin wire over the edge. He reels in the key, taps in a PARISCODEX sequence, listens carefully for reactions.

Characters come back to him, slowly at first and then getting faster and faster, enough that he keys in _Hold, repeat._

The stream slows and he deciphers the encryption, and he’s still standing up when he starts talking to whoever is on the other end of the line. _M for P or Y, please respond. M for P or Y._

He holds his breath, waits for a response, leans over the table. A muscle below his left knee tics, starts to spasm in irregular intervals, but he merely shifts his weight and keeps listening.

 _What the hell just happened?_ Coulson sends. _We’ve just had a fucking meltdown!_

As he untangles the text Erik freezes in place. The words are practically crackling with an anger that burns down the link between him and the rest of the Section 8 operators. 

When he’d been training there he’d had time to make his mistakes, and he’d listened to the other operators as they made mistakes. Coulson had administered every last reprimand, and done so quietly and calmly.

He’s never heard Coulson swear - that had been more Melinda’s province, and of course Maria’s - and now this. 

What kind of attack did Sean experience, and how badly has the post been affected? 

Have Section 8’s listening operations been compromised? If so, how badly?

There is a pause on the line, and Erik thinks he might be able to hear Moira pacing, and Howlett chewing irritably on something, all over the frantic beat of his own heart.

When Coulson resumes, the cursing is gone, but the speed at which he’s transmitting makes Erik think of cold anger, and _that_ he’s familiar with, intimately, painfully. It had sunk its claws into him in the hours immediately before and after Janos’s funeral. 

Now he’s experiencing for himself what it might be like for other people, and he can feel it in the relentless click and clatter of the signal he’s receiving.

 _All lines of communication were lost for about one or two minutes,_ Coulson sends. _Every single operator says that he or she heard a very loud sound on all channels. Are you all right? Were you on the line when that happened?_

Erik taps his response back, as quickly as he can. _That is what happened here, too. CAS was temporarily incapacitated, but now he is recovering, I think._

“How do you feel, Sean,” Erik asks. “They’re asking after you back at the post.”

The response sounds less dazed, but still like a croak. “Fine. I’m still alive, thanks.”

“We still need to know what just happened,” Irene says. “And to prevent it from recurring, if we can.”

“What were you listening to, just before you heard the noise?” Rachel asks, hoarsely.

“One of Erik’s numbers stations,” Sean says.

“They’re not _my_ numbers stations,” Erik says, mildly.

“You found them, so we call them yours.” There’s a pause, and when Sean starts talking again, he sounds like he’s thinking hard at the same time. There are long intervals between his words. “I think Coulson should have the operators make a list of whatever it was they had been listening to.”

Erik nods. “Which station was it?” As soon as Sean tells him, he starts tapping a message back. _CAS was listening to the following numbers station when he heard the noise. He suggests you ask the other operators what they were listening to._

_It’s a good suggestion. We’ll get on it immediately._

“Anything else?” Erik asks.

“Yes,” Charles says, unexpectedly. He seems to be standing at a distance from the others, if the faint echo of his voice is anything to go by. “Ask him if any of the operators have noted any kind of uptick in the amount or frequency of messages being sent from Genoshan sources in the last, say, three days. Every single one of the operators, mind, not just the ones who are supposed to be listening for us. We’re within days of the Shaw-Worthington nuptials, I can’t imagine Genosha’s not talking about it.”

“Sean?” Kitty asks. “We might as well start with you, since you’ve been taking a lot of the recent shifts.”

“Some of the stations have been getting busier, yes, but there wasn’t anything sudden about it. I just noticed that there were a few more transmissions every day, creeping upward,” Sean says. “How is that relevant?”

“Have they decided to be sensible? You’ll excuse me my prejudices,” Erik says, “but I could never call anyone like Selene or Shaw sensible.”

“Exactly.” There are footsteps, and then Charles’s presence nearby, and Erik doesn’t lean in his direction, though he wants to. “It’s as if they’re changing tactics in midstream. That noise would certainly count as a change. Let’s assume that that noise was - not any kind of malfunction. What if it was an attack on anyone and anything keeping tabs on them?”

“It might be plausible - but why, exactly, would they do something like that in the first place?” Moira asks. “The noise, the signal, whatever it was, was transmitted onto all of the channels that we can receive. That means that any stations allied with Genosha would have gotten attacked, as well.”

There’s a more than palpable sneer in Howlett’s voice when he says, “Genosha doesn’t care about its allies.”

Erik listens as Charles shifts on his feet, forward onto his toes, backward onto his heels. His mind races, trying to think through the implications of Charles’s statement.

Again, it’s Kitty who asks the question. “We’ve never had any attacks coming from the stations themselves. So it’s something new. Maybe there’s been a power play? Or something related to that. It makes sense to me. Tactics come from on high, bar mavericks in the ranks - ”

Someone snorts in amusement. Erik can’t tell if it’s Howlett or Betsy or Jean. 

Kitty laughs, quickly and quietly and neatly, and continues: “If there’s been a change in their tactics, then there’s been a change in the group of people who decide on these things.”

“And you’ve been operating on the assumption that Sebastian Shaw leads the Genoshan groups. Or controls the majority of them,” Erik says.

“The majority of the militant ones,” Charles says. “Yes, well, it’s not an unreasonable assumption to make, isn’t it?”

“He’s lost control to someone who would rather do shit like this?” Howlett asked. “Hard to believe.”

“He might have given up some of that control, or - ”

“He’s sharing it?” Moira asks. “We’ve been dealing with him and his for some time now, and that really doesn’t seem like his style at all.”

“Erik, is the line to Coulson still open?”

“Yes, Charles,” Erik says, and taps out a message for good measure. _M for P, we are sending, please stand by._

 _This is Y, we are standing by,_ is the response.

“Melinda’s holding,” Erik tells the group.

“Even better,” Charles says. “Please ask her to check in with the codebreakers. I want to know if they’ve detected any changes in the messages they’ve been able to intercept and decipher. Changes in grammar or vocabulary, changes in the content of the messages. Word choices, different sentences - ”

“The messages we send and receive and listen to tend to be short,” Moira says. “Are you sure there’s something to be found in that?”

“I’m willing to try anything. This attack is completely unprecedented. So we have to consider grasping at straws.”

“We’ve done that,” Jean says, to more laughter.

This time, however, there’s an edge to the quiet chuckling, and Erik can clearly hear it in the huff and shift of Charles’s breathing, never mind that of the others.

Erik’s leg twinges again, and this time he does reach around for the chair, and when he finds it he drops into it, graceless and reckless. 

“Are you all right, Erik?” Rachel asks.

“I’ll be fine,” he tells her. “I have just been standing in the wrong position, that’s all.”

“Have _you_ heard any changes in the transmissions during your shifts?”

He thinks about it: strange clicking cacophony, Morse code rhythms dancing beneath his fingertips.

But before he can say anything in response the line crackles back to life in his ears, and he murmurs apologetically in Rachel’s direction. He sets his cane aside, takes his other hand from his leg, and focuses on the instruments once again. 

_Y for M, urgent._

_Go, Y,_ Erik sends. _We’re listening._

_Message from the codebreakers. They have been tracking the messages in the past few days. There’s a new cipher in use and they’ve already broken it. We’re getting the Genoshan messages in the clear._

Erik whispers the words to himself as he deciphers the code - and then, when he’s done with that part of the message, he relays it to the others, more loudly. 

The sounds he hears, after, are surprised and disbelieving and downright rude. And he can sympathize with every single one of them.

He’s about to send _You have got to be joking_ when Melinda starts transmitting again.

_MH thinks Hornet is still in charge._

He has to translate the name “Hornet” into the name Sebastian Shaw, though he also remembers that everyone in the room with him might well know about those two names fastened onto one man.

_But it looks like there might be another leader, and that this leader appeared at around the time the Genoshans started to make mistakes in their transmission protocols, in the texts of the messages._

_That’s when you cracked the cipher,_ Erik sends.

 _Yes._

The buzz from the others grows louder and louder as he continues to share the transmissions with them. 

_Latest news? Any idea on who the new leader might be?_

_They’re homing in on two or three possible individuals. Selene may or may not be one of those possibilities. I’ve been told you’re on a rota with CAS and a few others. Then we can get new information to you as soon as the codebreakers see fit to share them with us._

_Thank you,_ Erik sends.

_**She** says good luck and keep safe._

It’s not hard to figure out who “she” might be. After all, Section 8’s directives and orders have to come from one woman, who is also capable of wishing her people well. 

Just for a moment he wishes he could see Emma Frost’s face, if only to see the lines that determination and vigilance must have carved into her - not to mention the scars that people in the agency keep gossiping about.

Then he hears the tone that says Melinda’s half of the connection has been closed, and now he can take his hands off the instruments and turn back to the others.

The others, who have apparently gotten into a quiet but intense argument about current developments. Even Rachel is gone, as he finds out when he leans down to search for a sign of her presence. The patch of floor where she had apparently been sitting is already cool when his fingertips make contact.

“Erik,” a familiar voice says, and this one he leans into, never mind what the others might say. 

“Hello, Charles,” he says, turning in the direction of the shift in air as Charles groans quietly and sits down on the floor. “Do you want to sit in my chair instead?”

“Don’t think I didn’t see you looking unhappy in those last few moments spent standing up. Stay there. You need to rest, and so do I, but we are suddenly so close to a possible end to this whole operation when for such a long time we could only assume that there would never be any end in sight. The recent events, the recent changes, seem to be too good or too bad to be true, to be honest.”

He considers Charles’s words carefully, and says, “Yes. I feel the same way.” He waves his hand and hopes he’s pointing out the others. “I think we all do.”

“It really is different for us, isn’t it,” Charles says, a little self-deprecation bubbling up underneath the words. “So many changes, so little time. I keep thinking about time. Is there enough? Can we make it enough?”

“The more hands you have, the more people to help you, the more likely that might happen.”

“Not always, and I think you know that, too.”

Erik bows his head, conceding the point. 

“It shouldn’t stop me from making plans,” Charles continues. “And now I’m going to ask you a question that might very well make you hate me.”

“It has to do with those plans, doesn’t it?” Erik asks, and he doesn’t wait for an answer, just continues. “Ask me first.”

“I need to use you, Erik, someway, somehow. I haven’t completely thought it through yet. But one way or another, I will need you around. You will have a part to play in all of this, before all of it is over. Will you let me include you in your plans?”

“These plans of yours,” Erik says, slowly, “they’re full of danger, aren’t they?”

 

“Yes. Unfortunately, any plans related to Shaw and his people are going to be full of danger, hazardous, by default. And my plans right now are big plans to go with the big day.”

“Since you’re protecting important people, and since you’re going after an important criminal and his associates.”

“Yes.” Charles swallows, and once again Erik can hear the tension in him, manifesting as his hands clenching and unclenching into fists. “Are you with me, Erik? Will you let me use you as I plan to use the others, all of Section 8 if I must?”

Erik shifts in the chair, feels around behind him for the edge of the table so he can lean a little against it. His back hurts, his leg is still going to give way beneath him if he stands up now, and his head is spinning from trying to pay attention both to Charles and to the whispers from the others.

He taps the tips of his pointer fingers on his knees. Once. Twice. He moves the rest of his fingers, tapping, first in sequence: the little finger of his left hand to the little finger of his right hand, not skipping over his thumbs. 

Simple finger exercises, he thinks, and in his mind the tapping becomes Morse code, slow and unsure and full of mistakes to begin with. Mistaking E for I and T for M. Confusing B for V. 

As the warmth rushes into his fingertips his movements become more complicated. A gradual buildup, from simple notes, to chords, and then to bigger chords. Improving his fist and his listening abilities at the same time. Learning to hear Morse code through the constant whine and buzz of static on the radio, and translating Morse code on the move. 

Trills, arpeggio, ornaments; the words PARIS and CODEX and the Section 8 operators’ encrypt codes for direct communication.

And now, these past few days. The whirl and the frenetic conversations, the number of people sharing quarters in this space. It makes him think about a task winding inexorably to its finish. He can even think about the others as instruments in an orchestra, appearing to play their roles and to play them well, no matter how large or small the role might turn out to be.

He thinks of Moira and of Howlett leading the orchestra, and of Charles himself as concertmaster, with Emma Frost as the conductor. Section 8 might be focused on Charles’s operation now, but ultimately Section 8 lives and dies with their shotgun-carrying leader, and he thinks he’d follow her, he’d follow where Charles takes them at her say-so, if there’s some good to be had out of all of it, if there’s a chance to make things right.

He starts to play, and the melody only exists in his mind, but he can hear it clearly, and he lets himself soar through it. The third movement of the Moonlight Sonata, with all of its accents and complexity and the direction, _presto agitato_. He’s heard people describe the music as stormy, and he even remembers what it had been like to read that score for the first time, all rapid-fire ferocity and emotion. 

He plays it now, in the silence of his thoughts, and seven to seven and a half minutes normally pass by faster than he would notice - but not when he’s concentrating on this, his feet striking the floor as he thinks about pedals and his reach up and down the keyboard, the quick notes and the moments where he has to snatch his breath. Seven minutes and thirty seconds of playing out a complicated score, of the piano and him pulling together and pulling at each other, all the way to the final scales and the final notes.

When he’s done, he murmurs, “Forgive me. I was thinking.” And he reaches out for Charles despite his perspiring palms. 

“Erik,” Charles says, holding on tightly. The strength in his hand is immense and both expected and unexpected at the same time. A man who knew his books, who knew people, and who was reasonably well-versed in certain kinds of fighting. “Your answer, please.”

Erik hopes he says the right thing, now. “Tell me what needs doing, Charles.”

Movement, and where he has just been sitting mostly upright and supported by the table he is now leaning almost all the way out of the chair, arrested from falling only by the sturdy presence of Charles’s shoulder and the grip of Charles’s hand, and Charles apologizes but he’s not really paying attention, because he’s too busy leaning into Charles.


	14. Chapter 14

Erik performs another scan of the enemy stations, and all he gets is a strange muted buzz, and it’s the same sound that he’s been hearing for the past hour or so. The same sound that Irene’s been telling him about, the same sound that she’s been hearing since she took her most recent turn at the instruments, six hours and a few minutes ago.

“Irene,” he says now.

He hears a rustle, the click of something being put away - a gun or a knife, he’s not sure which, since Sean and Rachel have both told him that Irene is proficient with most weapons - and a footstep coming his way. “Either you have something to report or you have nothing to report,” she says, and she sounds worried. Like there are cracks and fissures in the words themselves, nothing you could hear in her voice, which is steady and low as it always is. “Which is it?”

“I have nothing to report. I don’t understand, or maybe I do. Of course we’ve been thinking about our enemies changing their tactics, so they are unpredictable, so we don’t know what to do. But this - this I don’t understand at all. Even when they’re off planning something they have to coordinate, one way or another. Or perhaps I am just unnerved by this silence.”

“I’m completely unhappy about it,” Irene says. “And in a situation like this there is only one thing we can do, which is: prepare for anything and for everything.”

“I have a bad feeling about that,” Moira says, and her footsteps come closer, as well. “Here’s the coffee you asked for, but I warn you Howlett made it, so you may or may not want to drink it.”

“Ugh,” Irene says, but Erik hears her take a sip anyway. “Terrible. But the caffeine is what I need. I’m not drinking this for my health or because I like it.”

“Story of my life,” Howlett answers from the kitchen.

“Kindly find yourself a bridge to jump off of,” Moira says, and she, too, sounds disgusted as she drinks.

So Erik refrains from touching the cup that radiates heat next to his left hand.

“Bad feelings,” Irene says, suddenly. “Moira, wake everyone up. Make sure everyone’s ready to run, or fight, or both. There’s a pinch in my gut that tells me I’d rather be on my toes and have it be for nothing, than do nothing and regret it very bitterly indeed.”

“Already done,” Moira says.

Even Erik has to tense at the hiss in her words. 

“I knew it was a good idea to stay packed up when we got here,” Irene continues. “I can’t shake the feeling we’re being watched, and - ”

Something whines and something goes _click click click_ in a familiar rhythm, and Erik doesn’t spare the breath to gasp in surprise. He claps his headphones back on, and in the instant before he starts keying a response to the encrypted message he’s receiving, he can hear the two women shouting at the others.

Only for an instant, and then he’s on his own feet, hands off the instruments, braced on the table.

Because the message he’s hearing is this:

 _M, if you can hear this, don’t authenticate. Don’t respond. Listen very carefully. Hornet’s people are on the move. They may be headed your way. Get everyone out!_

The message repeats. Once. Twice.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Erik says, and he tears the headphones off. “Moira! Irene! Charles!”

“They’re here, we know, they’re here or they’re almost here.” For all the tension in it just a few minutes ago, Moira’s voice now sounds icy calm, and utterly competent. “Step away from the radio, Erik. They might see fit to attack us, attack you, and I don’t want that.”

He does. “Tell me what to do.”

“Is everyone present and accounted for?” Irene asks, staccato anger in her words.

“We’re here,” Kitty says.

“Good. Then we only have to say this once,” Moira says. “Irene, Jean, Betsy. You stay here with me. We’ll defend this place, cover for the rest of you, make them think you’re still here. Get your guns and your knives. Anything it’s going to take. Barricade the front door - ”

A crash, and Howlett’s grunts of effort.

“Right, and when you’re done with that, Howlett, I want you to take Kitty back to the post with you.”

“I want to stay, I want to help - ” Kitty begins.

“Quiet. Listen to me,” Moira says. “You need to help me, help us, by getting back to Emma Frost. She has to know what’s going on here. You can move through crowds quickly and easily, and Howlett will watch your back, make sure you get out.”

“I’m authorizing you to go to our contacts in the police,” Irene adds. “You know who they are, and you know how to identify yourself to them. Get them to help you if you think you might need them. Howlett, are you about done?” 

“Yeah,” is the rasp of a reply. “Get your shit, Kitty, we’re going now.”

“Take care of her, Howlett, or I will personally eviscerate you _before_ I turn you over to Irene,” Charles says, the friendliness in his voice at complete and utter odds with his words.

“You don’t have to threaten me, I know exactly what you want to do.”

Running footsteps, the steady thud of Howlett’s boots, the creak and whistle of a window being opened, and then silence.

“They’re gone,” Charles says after a charged silence.

“Good. Rachel, Sean,” Moira says. “You’re going to the nearest military installation. Get us some backup or cavalry or whatever you want to call it. Same instructions as Kitty. You should have the countersigns you need - if not, ask for them, we’ll give you everything we have.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Rachel says. “Come on, Sean.”

“Yeah, just,” Sean says. Something goes _click_. “Okay. I just hope we have enough ammunition.”

“There’s no such thing,” Irene and Charles say together.

Erik suddenly finds himself smothering the urge to break into hysterical laughter. There’s nothing at all funny in those tightrope-strung words.

A step, a nearby presence. “It’s all right to laugh, Erik, it’s called gallows humor,” Charles says. “I know you’re familiar with it.”

“Not this kind,” Erik tells him honestly. 

The thought strikes him about a second later. “And - you and me. Where do we go? What do we do?” 

He attempts to turn in Moira’s direction, but he stops when Charles takes his hand. 

“You and I,” Charles says, gently, “are getting out of here. I’m - a target, to put it very lightly, and so are you, and so - we have to leave the others.”

Bile rises in Erik’s throat. He forces it back down. “I wish I could fight.”

“I wish you could, too. But at this point you’ve done your part. You’ve listened, you’ve sent information, you’ve received information, you’ve sent us the warning. More than enough,” Irene says. “Now, you run, because you have to. We need you alive. We need you to keep listening.”

Charles’s hand tightens around his. “I need you to be just you, and for that, I need to make sure you’re alive. Come with me?”

“That’s not fair, Charles,” Erik says. “You know I will.”

Charles kisses the hand he’s holding. “I’m not going to apologize. Anything to keep you alive, Erik, I swear.”

Erik concedes the point and the argument. He lets go of that brief flash of anger. “Let me get my things.”

It takes him a few moments - he hasn’t been in here long, and they haven’t exactly been stable, the population in these rooms having changed as people came and went on their various tasks. But eventually he finds the bag that he’d carried all the way back from his original flat, to the post, and then back to the city and to this place. 

Last of all he retrieves his cane, and reaches for Charles’s hand. “How are we getting out of here? It sounded like Kitty and Howlett went out through a window - ”

“No, no, nothing like that. I couldn’t manage it,” Charles says. 

“Did you hear Rachel leave?” Irene asks.

“No, I didn’t,” Erik says.

A quiet, sharp laugh. This one belongs to Moira. “That’s because there’s a secret passage out of here. It’ll land you about half a block away, no way to connect you with the building, much less this flat.”

Erik raises his eyebrows, then taps his way over to her. He offers her his hand. He says the only words he can say. “I know you’ll fight hard, and you’ll survive.”

“For Janos, and for myself.” Moira takes his hand, squeezes, sharp and hard, just for a moment.

Erik doesn’t wince. He smiles, and offers that same hand to the others. Irene’s handshake is firm, but gentle.

Neither Jean nor Betsy take it. Instead, they hug him, both of them at the same time, one on each side. 

“You look after Charles,” Betsy says. “He can be so damned reckless.”

“Hey,” Charles says, half-complaining.

Erik ignores him. “I’ll do everything I can.”

“Good,” Jean says, then steps away, prods him gently in the shoulder. “Then go, go now, you don’t have any more time to lose.”

He heads toward Charles, and Charles meets him halfway, and as Charles takes his hand and leads him in the opposite direction from the kitchen he hears Irene say, “Ready, ladies?”

“Are they going to be - ” He doesn’t get the chance to finish the question, because Charles’s grip on him tightens. 

“It might not reassure you if I said,” Charles says in between the sounds of a key scraping in a lock that’s only recently been used, “that I’ve already entrusted my life to each and every one of them in the past. So think about this instead. They were all asked to be Emma Frost’s bodyguards. They’re that good.”

“Did they - if they’re all still here, then that means they refused,” Erik says.

“Yes, they did. To the last woman. Jean told me, at least, that she’d do better protecting people in the field. And that’s what she does. I’m lucky to have her and Betsy both. They’ve saved my arse far too many times to count. Sean’s, too.” 

A quiet sound, and then the air in the room moves in a different direction and this time when Erik scuffs his shoe along the floor he hears strange echoes, deep and leading down. “That’s the secret passage.”

“Yes. Come with me?” Charles asks again.

Erik doesn’t hesitate. He taps his way forward, brushes past Charles, and he listens to the echoes he creates with every step. 

He can feel the walls before he can even reach out to touch them, and the same is true for the low-hanging ceiling, and he’s not afraid, not when woven into the steps of his own feet walking onward is the sound of Charles walking behind him, watchful, protective.

Erik starts to hum, softly, and uses the echoes to navigate. 

It’s not the tunnel itself that’s making him nervous, anyway; it’s not the surrounding presence and pressure that makes his notes waver.

He’s just not happy with the idea of being attacked, of someone or something waiting at the other end, of Charles being put into danger.

“Erik,” Charles whispers.

He stops humming. “Sorry. I’ll stop.”

“No, no, don’t you stop. Under no circumstances are you allowed to stop,” Charles says. The tunnel makes his voice echo in a strange way that makes Erik thinks of Charles speaking directly inside his mind. “I just - can you do that a little more quietly? I don’t want you to stop, but I don’t want anyone hearing us either - ”

Erik nods. He understands. There’s no point in escaping through a secret passage if you announce that you’re in the passage in the first place.

So he takes a breath and begins again, much more quietly this time, and he goes through one of the development sections for _blue_ , and it isn’t until he’s almost at the end that Charles clears his throat. “That sounds marvelous.”

“Thank you. Are we there?” Erik asks. “At the other end?”

“Yes.”

Charles steps carefully around him. 

Erik holds his breath, and takes in the silence. The distant rumbling rattle of a car. Voices, but not nearby, and not threatening.

“What do you hear,” Charles asks.

“It might be safe out there,” Erik says.

“But you won’t mind if I go out first. Put your hands on the door, and if I tell you to close it, _you close it_. You don’t ask any questions, you don’t pull me in. You close the door. Understood?”

Erik bites down on all of the objections that crowd the tip of his tongue. His response comes out strangled and unhappy anyway. “Understood.”

“Thank you, Erik.”

Hinges, groaning softly, and a deep and deliberate drawn-out breath.

Unlike the door on the other end, Erik doesn’t hear this one swing open - and neither does he hear Charles’s next movements. 

He thinks about Charles and the fight he heard, or didn’t really hear, against Selene: all he can remember is a series of impacts, body against body, and their harsh breaths. 

This time, Charles is absolutely silent, and absolutely gone from his side.

Erik takes in a rapid, starved breath, and another, and keeps his hands braced on the door as he’s been told.

The next moments pass, long and slow, and his heart beats frantically in his chest, like a metronome that’s become unhinged, oscillating so wildly he might fall apart - 

“Erik? Erik. Come on. It’s all right.”

The voice sounds like it could be Charles’s.

Erik lets go of the door, and a hand takes one of his, and pulls him out of the tunnel.

Again he scuffs his feet, and the echoes are faint and they tell him about buildings and houses and people walking by, and the door that is being closed behind him.

“I haven’t been out in the world for a while,” he says, and he doesn’t know why he still feels like he has to whisper.

“I know,” Charles says. “We had to stay cooped up at Moira’s place for our own safety.”

“Especially after the attack on you.”

“Which one?” Charles sounds like he might be smiling.

Erik growls softly, and sends one of his best frowns in the other man’s direction. “That’s not even remotely funny.”

“No, it’s not. I thought it would be. I apologize.” A sigh, and again Charles’s hand around his. “Come on. We have to get away from here.”

“Where to?” Erik asks.

Blocks, intersections, and the occasional shout of conversation from what Erik thinks has to be a window that someone has left open. 

He holds on to Charles’s hand, even as that grip begins to tighten, imperceptibly at first - and very much welcome. He returns the grip and thinks of Charles’s side as the only safe place in the world, now that the circumstances forbid him from being at a piano.

The echoes shift constantly around him, but he doesn’t need to listen to them, not when they make four left turns in a row. “Why are we walking around in circles?” he asks, back to whispering.

“I wanted to make sure no one was following us,” Charles says, but there is something in the hitch of his breath that puts Erik on high alert.

“Is there - ”

“I think so - ”

“Alley, Charles, the darkest one you can find,” Erik says.

To his credit, Charles doesn’t ask questions, just veers off in a new direction.

Brick, Erik thinks when Charles turns left. Brick alley, high walls on either side, and that accounts for the clearer quality of the echoes. “Dark enough, I think.”

“Good,” Erik says, and he says, “Stop here.”

“Erik I - ”

That’s enough for him; he homes in on Charles’s voice, swoops in, cups that face in both hands. “Am I facing away from the mouth of the alley?”

“Yes.” Charles’s breath, warm and just a little shocky, breaking onto his skin.

Erik kisses him, and wishes he had his hat to further obscure his features, but he soon turns his attention back to Charles when his hands come up to grasp both of Erik’s wrists.

“Oh - _do that again_ ,” Charles pleads as Erik pulls away to listen for approaching footsteps.

When he processes the words he’s only too happy to dive back in. Charles’s tongue sweeping against his, as if to stake a claim.

He’s weak in the knees from more than just the kiss when they break apart.

“Is there anyone else still out there?” he asks.

Charles chuckles, and the sound is startling and satisfied and leaves Erik light-headed with a sudden fierce arousal. “If you’re still thinking about that now - ”

“I have to,” Erik says, “because if I don’t, if we die, neither of us is making it to bed, and I really don’t want that.” 

“Bed,” Charles says, as if testing the weight and the shape of that word on his tongue, and Erik shivers. “Yes. I would like that. And I know just the place. Somewhere we’ll be safe for a few hours.”

“Is there such a thing?” Erik asks.

“Yes,” Charles says, and they start walking again, and Erik doesn’t stop feeling tense until Charles adds, “Coincidence, maybe, no one’s following us anymore.”

The familiar whine and rattle of traffic, still loud even when it must be late at night. 

“We’ve been here before,” Charles whispers. “Act natural.” 

And before he knows it Erik hears someone murmuring “Good evening”, feels his shoes sink into plush carpet, persistent muffled echoes of conversation and genteel eating and drinking and a man’s voice singing a slow, sultry song.

“What I’d give for a proper cup of tea,” Charles murmurs.

“Are we - is this the hotel? The one where you meet - ” Erik stops, thinks about his words. “Where you meet the others?”

Charles stops, puts his arm in the crook of Erik’s elbow. “Yes?”

“This is your idea of a safe spot,” Erik says, amusement warring with disbelief - and, if he’s honest, a certain fondness.

“Seemed a good idea at the time.”

That’s it, that’s what undoes Erik, and he starts to laugh, softly. “You are ridiculous.”

“Of course I am,” Charles murmurs, and this time Erik can hear the smile, but only for a moment. “Now how do we disguise you - they’ll remember a blind man easily - ”

“Leave that to me,” Erik says, “just take my cane, then head on to the front desk.”

And as soon as Charles does so, Erik allows himself to stagger, and to mutter, “I can’t see”; he starts and he stops and he sways. He tries to be a hindrance to Charles.

Who suddenly says, “Come along, darling, too many drinks again, you ought to sleep that off,” sweet and cajoling and perhaps even mildly exasperated.

“Bed sounds good,” Erik says, trying his best to slur the words together as if in a drunken stupor.

Movement from nearby, a shift in the air, and it’s all he can do to avoid falling out of character, to shield Charles’s body with his own.

“Can I help you, sir?” someone asks, from very close by.

“No, no, thank you,” Charles says. “I can handle him on my own.” 

“If you’re sure, sir.”

Charles’s hand holds on to him, a tight and firm grip, and Erik lurches after him, trying to remember how his friends had looked like when they’d been out on the town after a night of applause and the stormy cadences of an orchestra in full swing.

As for himself, he can remember being careful, drinking judiciously through a hearty conversation, just enough to pull down some of the barriers in his mind. He remembers thinking of ideas for new music as he worked through the buzz of his cigarettes and a handful of beers.

A clatter and a clash and a soft _clang_ , and Charles says, “Come on, elevator, going up.”

Erik fakes a case of the dry heaves, covers his face with both hands as the cage rises.

“Almost there,” Charles says, when the elevator stops.

Erik steps onto a quiet floor. Past the sounds of conversations escaping closed doors, past the soft whispers of music that he doesn’t recognize because there is too much drum in it, past the loud and sudden pop of a champagne bottle being opened, which he pretends to look back at.

Again the sound of a key in a lock, but this scrape is quieter than most, and Charles sighs and makes an inarticulate sound of relief when the door clicks again - presumably it’s closed now.

Cautiously, Erik rights himself. He hums softly, just a handful of random notes this time, and he tilts his head back to listen to the echoes. “This is a _big_ room, Charles,” he says.

“It is, isn’t it,” is the response. “And then there’s the bed.”

Erik walks forward, carefully, listening for his footsteps to become muffled - but he runs into the frame before that happens. He fits his hand around a thick column, extravagantly carved. Fine wood grain beneath his fingertips. 

Then, fluttering material, yards of it, fine and soft against his skin. 

His knees hit the bed and he has to resist the urge to fall face-down and forward into it. Soft, with just enough firmness, and smelling like sun-warmed linen.

Instead he makes himself feel around for a place to sit down, and he takes off his shoes and his socks, sinks his bare feet into the carpet. He can’t help but wiggle his toes. He sets his sunglasses aside, too. The warmth is welcome, after the chill of the tunnel, and the pure cold fear that he’s still carrying around with him. They’re still in danger, after all; a hotel room can’t protect them.

The bed dips next to him, close enough to touch, and Charles’s warmth is next to his skin, and he lists helplessly towards Charles.

Luckily Charles doesn’t seem to mind - he pulls Erik in, and Erik goes, and Erik gives in to the temptation to put his ear against Charles’s chest. The boom of Charles’s heartbeat is steady and constant. 

“How can you be so calm?” Erik asks. “We’re in danger, the others are running, and we left four good people back there to wait to be attacked.”

A long pause, a soft touch on his head. Erik holds on more tightly. His arms around Charles’s waist.

“I’m not calm at all,” Charles says, as if it’s a confession. “As a matter of fact I’m very, very angry. We shouldn’t have to be in a position like this at all. We shouldn’t have to be on our toes all the time, waiting to run for our lives. We shouldn’t have to live our lives listening for dangerous things, waiting for someone to attack. I’m angry, and I have a chance to do something about it, and I have a job to do and I can’t _stand_ being interrupted by idiots like Shaw.”

A deep breath. Erik can hear it, and Charles’s convulsive swallowing. 

Charles continues. “I have complete faith in the others. We’ve been hurt before, and some of us have come near to dying, and we’re all still alive, which is important, because it means we’re all still fighting. And that’s just as true for the people back at the post, as well as - as for _you_ , Erik. You protected me there on the streets by pulling me into a dark alley - ”

“My motives were not entirely selfless,” Erik whispers.

Charles laughs softly. “I know. But you made sure to ask the right questions. You wanted me to watch your back. I tried to, but you are such an entirely good kisser. I’m afraid I might have gotten a little distracted.”

Erik snorts, only slightly appeased.

“And then - you were incredible, downstairs,” Charles says. “You acted the part beautifully. No one will remember a man who’s had too much to drink. Goodness knows this place gets more than enough of those in a single night. I didn’t have to do much, really; all I had to do was play the put-upon partner. _Et voila._ We are here and we are unremarkable people, and the door is closed. We can hope for a few hours of not being chased down alleyways. For the part you played in that, Erik - thank you. Truly.”

“You’re welcome,” Erik says.

“You’d make a fine soldier. You know when to follow orders, and you know when to act on your own initiative. Maybe we should talk to Emma Frost about putting you in to pick up some human-intelligence-gathering skills.”

“Thank you, but no thank you.” Erik shakes his head. “I know I am good with the radio and the telegraph key, and that is more than enough excitement for me. Besides, if I were out in the field like you, I’d never have the time to play the piano. The one that was lent to me is a good instrument, certainly worth further investigation. I would rather not lose the chance to become more acquainted with it.”

“As long as you don’t forget me in the process,” Charles says, and he might sound like he’s teasing, “I am perfectly willing to share you with that piano.”

“Forget _you_?” Astonished, Erik sits back up, though he doesn’t relinquish his grip on Charles’s frame, so he winds up pulling them together, flush against each other. Charles’s chest against his, Charles’s breath against his mouth, just as though they were back in the alley. Just as it had been on the night when they first kissed. “How could anyone forget you? How could I? Charles - ”

He gives up on the words. He’s being wound up, tighter and tighter. A piano string, pulled to the perfect tension, waiting for the right touch to make him sing out.

So he kisses Charles, pouring his emotions and his reactions out: the mad instinct to flee from their enemies, the equally desperate need to protect the other members of Charles’s team and of Irene’s, the crushing weight of the responsibility that they are all carrying on their shoulders.

And then there are the emotions that Charles himself generates in Erik: the urge to protect, the admiration, the ceaseless prayers for his safety, the sure and utter confidence that Charles inspires in him. The need to stay close by his side, and the pure disbelief he feels that Charles must want to be near him, too, if the way they touch and the way they flow together and the way they’re kissing now are any indication.

He can feel Charles’s hands on his shoulders, that powerful grip, and irrationally Erik thinks Charles will leave bruises in his skin and just as irrationally he wants that to happen, and he strains to press closer to Charles.

Charles pulls away, and Erik groans, trying to find his mouth again.

“Erik,” Charles says.

“Charles,” Erik says, helplessly.

“What are we doing?”

“Are you going to stop me if I tell you?”

“I’ll stop,” Charles says, and his hands are now holding Erik’s hands, gentle and firm and warm, “only if you want me to stop. I’m going to stop if you can’t go any further. If I - we - pass any limits you happen to have. I just - I want to know what you’re thinking. I want to know what we’re doing.”

Erik stops, shifts their hands again, and this time his are enclosing Charles’s. The truth comes out, in fits and starts. “I want to be with you, Charles. Here and now. And beyond here and now. Tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after _that_. Even when we walk away from the remains of Shaw and of his organization.” He takes another deep breath. “I thought I’d be able to get away from the part where I was grateful to you for saving my life. I did, only to fall into the rest of you. Straight into a life of borrowed time. Straight into stealing kisses and pretending not to notice that we’re touching. 

“So, if I’m only going to be borrowing these moments - this night, perhaps the only safe night I’ve ever known since I met you - then I’d like to spend it close to you. Closer than when we kissed. Closer than when you lean on me, or I on you.”

///

The words pour out from Erik’s mouth and Charles is surprised that he’s on the verge of tears.

He’s never known what it’s like to hear words like this. He’s never had anyone lay his or her heart bare to him. The life he leads is too full of secrets, of information tucked away into entirely neat and entirely separate cubbyholes, so many of them that he’s lost count. The life he leads is not one that is conducive to love, to truth, to beauty that is so real that it becomes vulnerable and brittle and fragile, prone to shattering at the slightest touch.

But here is Erik and he’s all of those things right now, and he’s falling silent. He’s out of breath, and out of words.

And Charles smiles, takes both of Erik’s hands in his own, guides them to his face.

Erik touches his tears, and the concern in his voice is beautiful and unnecessary. “I’m sorry,” he says.

“No, no, don’t be,” Charles says, and he presses in for a kiss, swift and sweet and gentle. “I’m not crying because I’m sad.”

“Then why?”

“I - you’re telling me the truth, Erik. Of all the people in this world to give that beautiful heart of yours to, you picked _me_. I’m completely convinced I don’t deserve it.” 

Erik looks like he’d like to object, and Charles forestalls him by laying fingertips across his mouth. “I make a point out of looking trustworthy, and I hide all kinds of secrets in my head, in my skin, up my sleeves. All kinds of secrets, which are weapons, which are tools, which are stolen. You know what I could do with the things that I know, with the things that you tell me, and yet - you tell me anyway. You are brave, and you are wonderful, and you think I’m beautiful.”

“You said that - that last part - back in Moira’s quarters - ”

Charles presses his fingers against Erik’s mouth again. “I did. I want to be selfish, just for now. Forget the others. Forget the rest of the world. Forget that there’s a wedding we have to break up and a man we may very well have to kill. They don’t exist, and they don’t matter, not now.”

Slowly, Erik nods.

“You want to be with me,” Charles asks.

“Yes. Yes, I do. For tonight, and for however long we’ve got.”

“And we’ve got tonight.” Charles smiles, reaches for Erik’s jacket. “May I?”

“Yes, please,” Erik says, and he flows easily underneath Charles’s hands, the layers slowly coming off.

Charles lingers over the buttons and the widening vee of Erik’s bared skin. 

When he sees Erik shiver, he presses closer, so much so that he’s practically sitting in Erik’s lap - or Erik is in his.

“Have you done this before?” he asks as he pushes Erik’s shirt down and runs reverent fingertips over the muscles in his shoulders. Erik’s skin is tight and soft at the same time, clinging to well-defined dips and curves. He can’t help but lean in and learn the line of Erik’s collar bone with his mouth.

He makes contact, and Erik groans softly. It’s a good sound, and Charles wants to hear more.

“Erik?”

“Yes,” and this answer is a little choked, a little rough around the edges. “I - I experimented, when I could, when there was a night to spare from the piano.”

Charles grins. “That sounds good. I hope I’ll be able to surprise you.”

“You already have - ” 

Charles noses carefully up and down the lines and stressed tendons in Erik’s throat, smelling the sweat and the salt and the musk of him - and then he bites down, very gently, at the very junction of neck and shoulder, and Erik shudders beneath him, hands coming up to Charles’s shoulders. “That’s it, I like that,” Charles says, encouraging, squirming to fit better - and the movement means he’s draped all along the length of Erik’s body.

Their combined weight forces Erik down to the sheets.

“Good?” Charles asks, just before he runs his tongue around the bob of Erik’s Adam’s apple.

Erik doesn’t answer, at least not in words.

Charles hums when Erik fits his hands to the small of his back, clever fingers pulling Charles’s own layers out of the way. Warmth, and ten points of contact.

He has the sudden image of Erik’s hands spread over him, as though he were eighty-eight keys and Erik were to play upon him, and he groans and kisses Erik, taking him thoroughly, and delighting in Erik fighting him to wrest control of the kiss.

“What was that for?” Erik whispers. His voice is breaking around the edges.

“I thought of you playing on my skin,” Charles whispers back, unabashed.

Erik groans, sweetly surprised. “ _Oh._ I never even thought - I will. You’ll let me. Later?”

“Yes, later, absolutely,” Charles says, fervent and bright and galvanized, and he twists off his shirt and his undershirt, until he’s bared to the waist the same way Erik is, and he doesn’t really know who groans when they touch.

Time passes, drugging and unhurried. He learns about Erik’s pulse and how it hammers beneath his skin, an unsteady drum. He licks up the sweat that stands out in bright beads in the crook of Erik’s elbow. He draws unsteady lines over the deep blue veins crisscrossing the thin skin of Erik’s wrist, the deep chained creases in Erik’s palm.

“Charles,” Erik whispers, over and over again, in a broken and thready voice.

He can hear the _want_ in Erik’s voice, and it inspires him, makes him reckless, and he bites into the mound of flesh at the base of Erik’s thumb just to hear Erik cry out, a beautiful sob.

He does it again and this time he watches as Erik throws his head back, baring the entire length of his throat. Erik’s face is twisted so beautifully, so perfectly, into lines of need.

Charles leans in to kiss at the corners of Erik’s eyes. “Tell me how you feel,” he whispers. “I want to hear you. What is it like for you, when I touch you like this?” And he spreads his hand over Erik’s belly. 

He watches as Erik draws in a sharp, shocked breath, and when he does the very tip of Charles’s little finger slides beneath Erik’s waistband.

He looks back at Erik’s face, catches the unmistakable hint of a smile curling up the corners of that lovely mouth, watches as Erik very deliberately twists his hips and Charles’s little finger disappears into Erik’s trousers.

That makes Charles smile, and then laugh, and he bites a kiss into Erik’s mouth, and whispers, “I thought you wanted to take your time.”

“That was a few minutes ago,” Erik says, and the grin is definitely there, now. “Now I want something else. Give me space to move, please?”

“And if I say no?” Charles asks, already tensing to move.

That grin gets even wider, turns into a filthy smirk, and Charles catches his breath as Erik’s hands ghost teasingly over his backside, then around to his front quickly, working his flies open.

For a moment Charles can’t help but stare at Erik’s long, dexterous fingers as they brush against the skin of his belly - then those fingers stray lower, and Charles growls an oath, claims another bruising kiss from an all-too-willing Erik, and slides down to get rid of Erik’s trousers and undershorts.

And then Erik is completely naked against the sheets, clad only in his own skin and the salt of his sweat.

He’s beautiful, and he’s smiling as though he can see the look of wonder on Charles’s face, and despite the desire that twists his face into a lovely grimace he still looks so trustingly in Charles’s direction.

“I - hope you don’t mind the scars,” Erik says, and Charles blinks, sees what he’s been looking at: the dark flat lines scoring around Erik’s ribs. 

He touches those scars very carefully now. “This was from the car - ”

“Yes. Outside the theater. I’ve never actually been able to see them. I only know how many there are. I only know that they’re just - there, lines of numbness in my skin.”

Charles brushes his fingertips over the scarred skin and the smooth, and presses kisses over Erik’s ribcage - he runs his tongue gently to trace the curves of skin over bone, down to follow the flat slope of Erik’s stomach and the quick heaving rush of Erik’s indrawn breath.

Down, to the line of close-curled hair that begins just below Erik’s navel. Dark brown against Erik’s skin, down and then he’s looking at the shape of Erik’s cock, circumcised and hard, curved against the muscles of his inner thigh.

“May I?” Charles whispers, reverently, and he waits for Erik to nod before taking him carefully in hand. Taut skin, blood-hot; he strokes, once, twice, and Erik groans, his legs falling open, and Charles can’t stop himself any more, doesn’t want to.

“Up, Erik, I want you on the pillows,” he says, and reluctantly he relinquishes Erik, but that gives him the time he needs to shimmy out of his own clothes - his breath catches when he remembers how Erik had unfastened his belt and buttons without any hesitation - and when he looks back up, he has to catch his breath again.

Erik is sprawled out on the pillows, his legs still parted, mouth still gasping so prettily for breath, and he looks like he wants to be debauched.

And Charles wants to oblige him, so much.

He crawls up to Erik on his hands and knees, catches that strong chin in one hand and holds him still. Whispers, feeling his own breath hot against Erik’s ear: “Last chance to back out,” he says, as steadily as he can, but that’s not really saying much when he’s shaking with his own need. “Do you want this? Do you want me?”

“Yes,” Erik says, and then: “Stop asking me for permission, Charles - you have it, you have all of it, please do whatever you want to me, please.”

Charles bites down hard on his own lip, nearly enough to draw blood. “I don’t want to hurt you - ”

“Even that sounds good coming from you,” Erik says, breathlessly. 

“Maybe,” Charles says. “Not tonight. I only want you, tonight. Just you and me. Let me make love to you.”

“Yes,” Erik says again, and then he turns his head, and kisses Charles.

A kiss that Charles returns with desperate fervor. Their tongues clash, their teeth get in the way, they have to break apart to gasp for breath - but they kiss over and over again, and Erik’s arms are wrapped strongly around Charles’s shoulders, both a steadying weight and a match to his incendiary desire.

Down. Again the taste of Erik’s body on his tongue. He sucks a bruise into Erik’s chest, just over his heart, and the combined vibration of Erik’s heartbeat and Erik’s pleading will stay with him for a long time, as will the obscenities that fall from that normally stern mouth when he leaves a similar mark in the crease between Erik’s torso and hip, over the jut of Erik’s hip bone.

“Charles, please,” Erik says, again and again, as he tosses restlessly.

Not even he can resist a plea like that - he only has so much strength in him - and at last, Charles takes Erik in hand, starts to pull in deliberate strokes.

Erik hisses as though he’s been hit hard, and all that comes out of his mouth is, “Harder.”

Charles has other ideas, though, and as soon as Erik is fully hard in the cage of his fingers he rakes his hair away from his forehead - the better to see Erik more clearly - and leans down. He wraps his mouth around the head of Erik’s cock.

Erik bucks, keens out Charles’s name, and Charles smiles and goes down on him, slowly, trying to remember what it’s like to breathe, completely surrounded in the mad rush of Erik’s scent, of Erik’s encouraging hoarse cries.

The weight of Erik on his tongue. His own labored breathing. Charles looks up, but his gaze stops dead on Erik’s hands fisting the sheets. He has to force himself to look past that. Up, through his eyelashes, to Erik’s mouth fallen open.

He slides down further, until Erik hits the back of his throat, and fighting off the gag reflex is more than worth it because Erik arches up off the sheets, his voice seemingly torn away at last, because he doesn’t make a sound, just fights for his breath. 

Charles moves up and then down again, to the beat of his own demanding pulse and Erik’s, to Erik’s fists striking the bed over and over again. His tormented delight, the insistent pulse of his need.

“Charles, Charles, _please_ ,” Erik whispers.

And Charles answers the unspoken request: he gets his hand around the base of Erik’s cock, starts to work his hand and mouth in a demanding rhythm.

He watches, wishing he could smile, because Erik claps both hands over his mouth and even they’re not enough to completely muffle his cries, louder and more incoherent until he finally pulls in a deep shuddering breath, until he goes completely taut and still under Charles, and then he’s filling Charles’s mouth with salty-bitter fluid.

Charles swallows him down eagerly, and when he pulls off he’s still licking the taste of Erik from his lips, and he climbs back up to the pillows to look his fill.

Erik fighting for his breath, sheen of sweat covering his skin, strands of hair falling into his eyes.

Charles brushes the hair away, touches Erik’s eyebrows, drawn together. “Are you all right?”

“I will be,” Erik says. His hand moves across the counterpane, towards Charles, and Charles catches that hand in both of his, presses a terribly tender kiss to the knuckles. “I just need to catch my breath.”

That shouldn’t make Charles smile, but it does, and he kisses Erik’s forehead, as well, and lets Erik chase him, draw him into a sweet and prolonged kiss. “Take all the time you need,” Charles says, after Erik reluctantly lets him go.

After a few moments Erik’s hand finds his again. “And you?” His voice still hasn’t recovered from its recent use, raspy and far deeper than Charles is used to hearing it.

And Erik doesn’t wait for him to respond, as he levers himself around so that he’s on his stomach, gently touching Charles’s skin. Luckily the bed is large enough to accommodate the two of them as they’re sprawled out, but the thought quickly flees Charles’s mind as he watches Erik’s hands. Splayed out over his skin, as if unerringly drawn to the patches of bright red flush. It’s almost too much for him to bear, and he closes his eyes and takes in a deep breath, counts backwards from one hundred, as quietly as he can.

“But I can hear you,” Erik says, and there’s a smile in Erik’s voice, and Charles’s eyes fly open just in time for Erik to kiss him, a fleeting touch of lips against the silvery lines etched into the skin of his thigh. “And I can feel this. Dare I ask - ?”

“Just kiss me,” Charles says, helpless. 

The smile this time is on Erik’s mouth. “With pleasure.”

Only the gentle pressure of Erik’s hands spanning his waist keeps Charles on the bed - Erik is hardly applying any strength, but he doesn’t need to - it’s the shock of it, the delicious suspense, that keeps Charles pinned to the sheets, as he waits breathlessly for the next place Erik will kiss him.

Erik’s fingers tracing teasing circles next to his cock, and Charles is torn between laughing and pleading, and the blood rushes loudly in his veins - he groans, and that sound contains the broken syllables of Erik’s name.

“I could write music on you if you’d trust me with a brush and ink,” he hears Erik muse, and he’d agree to that - he’d agree to anything - if not for the fact that Erik takes him in hand, then. 

“Do it,” Charles pleads, twisting on the sheets, “do it, Erik, please, _move_ \- ”

Erik does. Charles watches, wide-eyed, as Erik moves, hand and wrist and arm playing him, as though Charles were a song that Erik already knew, and - he can’t last.

Not when he looks at the wonder and the concentration on Erik’s face, the way Erik is biting his lip - 

He comes with a loud cry, and somehow he’s still looking at Erik as he gasps through the impact of it. Erik’s hand covered with white wet. Erik sticking one of his fingers into his mouth. Charles’s mouth goes dry at the sight.

“You taste good,” Erik says.

“Not as good as you do,” Charles manages to say, and after that he hauls himself up from the pillows, crawls into Erik’s lap.

Erik’s arms wind around him, warm and welcoming. 

As the visceral rush of orgasm flows away from him, leaving him spent, he can’t help but turn his face into Erik’s chest - and now Erik is shaking, fine tremors wracking his long and rangy frame.

“Still worried,” Charles says. It’s not a question at all.

He knows how Erik feels, because he, too, can feel it once again. The blank featureless yawning dark of fear.

“No word from the others,” Erik says, almost a question.

Charles shakes his head. “It’s much too soon to tell.” 

“I didn’t mean to destroy the mood.” 

“You didn’t,” Charles tells him, holding him closer. He kisses Erik’s cheek, and doesn’t know how to explain what he feels.

Erik makes a quiet sound, somewhere between a sob and a sigh, and he holds on to Charles and Charles holds on to him.


	15. Chapter 15

“Here we are,” Charles says as he comes to a smooth stop.

Erik looks up and nods, and doesn’t trust himself to reply.

“I think this looks like a good spot; what do you think?”

“It looks like it could use some work,” Erik says, lying through his teeth. For all he knows they could be standing in front of the kind of house that he’d been afraid to enter as a child, all pointed roofs and doors yawning open and narrow windows full of dark glass.

“Well, there is that,” Charles says, and how he sounds utterly cheerful and utterly vapid at the same time, Erik has no idea.

He’s listening to everything around him and his nerves are strained almost to the limit.

Behind him he can hear a handful of female voices, a mixture of grave and lilting. Someone walking an excitable dog that skitters and doubles back every few steps. Someone coughing over their morning newspaper. The pattering run of - schoolchildren? Youths? - perhaps on their way to school or away from it. The bright startling ring of a bicycle and its bell skimming past.

The sun is warm on his skin, but he feels like he wants to shiver. Sweat trickles down the back of his neck.

“Don’t be afraid,” Charles murmurs, and it’s a strange kind of relief to hear his real voice, to hear the grimness in his real words. None of the vacant laughter from earlier.

“That’s easy for you to say,” Erik grumbles. “You know what you have to do in a situation such as this.”

“Everyone has to start somewhere,” is Charles’s reply. “They gave me a script to begin with.”

“And you almost immediately threw it away, I’ll bet,” he says, scuffing his foot and listening for echoes for lack of anything else to do.

Charles laughs quietly, anyway, and the sound of it is completely at odds with how Erik feels, though he finds that he can’t resent Charles for it.

“No, that was later. A little later,” Charles says. “I had to learn how to be confident.”

“You mean you weren’t?”

“A story for another time.”

“Why are we still here?” Erik asks, after another moment of listening to the conversations behind him. “What are we waiting for?”

Another set of cheerful chimes, another whistling voice - Erik snaps to attention, tilts his head in the direction of whoever’s coming straight for them. Something he can recognize. A familiar pattern.

“Hello,” someone murmurs. “So sorry to keep you waiting. I’m here to show you the house.”

“Hello,” Charles says, and he does sound relieved. “It’s good to see you.”

“It’s good to see you,” Erik echoes, nodding in the direction of the newcomer’s voice.

“Follow me, gentlemen,” Rachel says now.

Erik follows, still holding tightly to Charles’s hand. 

The sound of a door resisting being pushed open. A sudden change of pressure. He’s more than glad to exchange the sunlight that prickles in his skin for darkness, if it also means being able to hide. 

Wordlessly he follows as Charles and Rachel exchange small talk all the way up several flights of stairs. He’s no longer carrying his cane. Charles broke it into pieces just before they left the hotel - too obvious, Charles had said as they stood on the sidewalk outside the hotel, and he still agrees even now, when he has to navigate just by the tread of his feet on each step, the subtle warm and cold of the banister, the echoes they stir all around them.

The ceiling above them seems so unimaginably high.

“Here we are,” Rachel says at last, a moment before Erik hears another set of footsteps coming towards them, and he doesn’t fight the instinct that makes him step towards Charles’s startled intake of breath.

“You’re alive!”

“Sean!” Charles exclaims, and then immediately afterwards Erik hears him clap his hand over his mouth.

“Alive and mostly well,” Sean confirms. “Got banged up a bit trying to get onto the base itself, but what’s a little almost-friendly fire between allies?”

“Then you’re not alone here?” Charles asks.

Erik tilts his head, tries to listen for the presence of others.

“No, we are not alone,” Rachel says. “We brought friends.”

“Come in, come in,” Sean sing-songs. “Did you lock the door downstairs?”

“And barricaded it again,” Rachel confirms. “No one’s getting in through that front door without us hearing it.”

“Other points of entry?” Charles asks.

“Well, those,” Sean hedges.

Erik listens to receding footsteps, and he sets off carefully after them. He listens as he’s never listened before, not even to coded enemy transmissions.

A door opens. He steps over the threshold. Immediately he can hear three others. Calm and controlled breathing. The almost-familiar sound of someone working on a complicated mechanism made of metal and moving parts - something very much like a gun. The quiet hiss of a radio at rest.

“It isn’t much, but there is enough space for us here, and more than enough space for - a few other things,” Rachel is explaining to Charles.

Who is, strangely, chuckling. “I should have known that you’d go against, I believe it was _three_ sets of direct orders?”

“What did you expect?” Howlett says.

Erik raises an eyebrow in the direction of that voice. “You’re here - _why_ are you here? And what about Kitty?” he all but demands.

“Kitty’s safe,” Howlett says. “No sooner had I gotten to the train station than she was taken off my hands by - friends,” he says. “They gave me their names, said you’d know who they were - you especially, Erik, since at least one of them’s spoken to you directly.”

He has no idea of whom the man might be talking about. “Who?”

“Melinda. And two people who talked like one person.” He hears the rustle and shift of Howlett’s movements, and that makes him think about the man being uncomfortable or curious or utterly indifferent, but he can’t really tell. “They gave their names as Jemma and Leo.”

“I know Melinda,” Erik says carefully. “If Kitty is with her, then she’s in good hands.”

“And that’s why I thought I could come back here. I knew the others would send someone to ask for military assistance. I didn’t expect it would be the two redheads.” 

Erik reaches one hand out, and it’s met by Charles’s comforting presence. “Redheads - Rachel and Sean both?”

“Yes,” Charles says, easily. “As are you, you know, if you sit in a certain light.”

“Spare me the lovey-dovey talk,” Howlett groans, mockingly.

“Moira tells you to go jump off a bridge; that’s too kind of her. I’ll tell you to go shoot yourself.”

“You still need me around.”

“I can do my work with one less.” There is real determination simmering in the staccato beat of Charles’s brittle words. Erik could almost believe that the words were true, were they not in such a desperate situation.

“Let’s not amuse the others any more than we have to,” Rachel suddenly says. Beneath her words is an unexpected quiet clatter. “Erik, you must be thirsty - water?”

“Please,” he said. He holds out his free hand, carefully, and the glass she hands him is beaded with cool condensation. The pleasantly heavy weight of ice cubes against his parched lips.

“The others?” Charles asks.

Erik goes where Charles goes, their hands still joined. Even when he makes a move to break away, to look for the source of the radio’s noise, Charles refuses to let him go.

“This is Armando, and the woman sitting next to the radio is Monet.”

Charles hums, thoughtful. “Didn’t you pilot the chopper for that mid-sea extraction?”

The woman - Monet - laughs quietly. “Yes, that was me. You have a good memory.”

“He’s one of Section 8’s best,” Sean says from another corner of the room. “Takes a special kind of person to get there. Besides, you don’t have to look at his credentials - look at him, he’s still _alive_ , isn’t he?”

Charles makes shushing noises, to no avail, and Erik allows himself a small smile. 

But the smile doesn’t stay. There are far more serious matters to contend with. He forces himself to say the words. “You have to tell me there’s been word from Moira and Irene - ”

“We did get - something,” Sean says, somber now, and Erik prepares himself to hear the worst. “It was very early this morning. Four digits, transmitted in the clear.”

“A certain group of agents in Section 8 is taught a specific set of codes in the form of numbers,” Charles says when Erik squeezes his hand, helplessly. “That way, we can communicate with each other out in the open if we must.”

“But it’s not a code that everyone in the agency knows,” Erik says. “What if you were sending to someone who couldn’t decipher it - ”

“Then that would be the response in and of itself,” Howlett says. “If the Section 8 listener happened to pick the numbers up and couldn’t respond - that means they couldn’t send it on to the posts, and that means the whole thing’s been compromised.”

“Well, this one I think Charles knows,” Sean says. “The numbers were one, eight, one, seven. Does that mean anything to you?”

Erik can’t see Charles’s expression - or anyone else’s for that matter - but he can hear the cautious relief in his voice when he speaks after a long moment. “At least two people got out of that one alive.”

There’s a long silence that roots Erik down to the very spot where he’s standing. He can’t feel relief, can’t feel anxiety.

“We can’t waste any time waiting, however,” Charles says eventually. “The Shaw-Worthington wedding is the day after tomorrow.”

“Now would have been a good time to strike,” Howlett says, “if we had all the people we needed.”

“Who says we don’t?” Charles counters. “There are seven people here. That’s enough - ”

“ - If we, or you, were being idiotic. Which you know you have no business doing.”

“I’m willing to do whatever it takes to stop that wedding and to get to the bottom of the whole mess.”

“Up to and including _dying_. That should be my line, since I don’t even have anyone to live for.”

“Liar,” three voices say, almost all at the same time.

Erik is almost startled into a laugh.

“I’m not going to let you stop me.” Charles’s voice grows colder with each word. It makes Erik think of snow falling silently onto a piano, freezing the strings in place, so that they can no longer sing. “And you can work with me, or not. You will do as you wish. 

“And I will do what I must.”

A sigh. A brief flash of sulfur-stink, and the sound of a flame coming to life. “All right. I just thought it was my turn to play at being the voice of reason.”

“You are very bad at it,” Monet drawls.

“Yes, I am. Now, Charles. Let’s hear this thing that you have to do. What do you want?”

Charles breaks away from Erik, then, and Erik lets him go, reluctantly.

“What do I want, Howlett? It’s a simple thing. I want Sebastian Shaw,” Charles growls.

Erik does give in to the urge to shiver, now.

Sean whistles, long and low. “I’ve seen you scary, Charles, but this is you at your very scariest.”

“Is that actually a word?” Armando asks. “No matter. It’s true. I agree. You are frightening, Mister Xavier. I would not want to be the person standing in your way.”

“But we know who is.” Rachel sighs. “Well, it was only a matter of time, Irene always said. One way or another, we were going to go after him, or someone close to him, and therefore bring his attention down upon us. The results would still be the same: Section 8 confronting that man.”

“And so there really isn’t much to do,” Charles says. “What do we do in order to draw Shaw’s attention? We snatch his intended bride.”

“You’re not asking for much,” Howlett mutters.

“Just the world on a silver platter, if I’m lucky enough.”

Erik clears his throat. “You’re going to the Worthington house. And then what?”

“The lady will not be harmed. I just want to use her to draw him in. It’s him we want and whoever else is helping him lead his group.” Charles sighs and sounds put-upon. “Things were so much easier when we could confirm, over and over again, that he was leading all of those separate groups just by himself. This entire situation with multiple leaders is just needlessly annoying.”

“Not to mention deadly,” Rachel says. “More leaders. More people with guns or people who control people with guns.”

“Well, if you’re talking about guns, we’re not exactly lacking in that department,” Monet says. “Howlett convinced us to bring an entire truckful. Listening to you now, I’m glad we did. We also brought some uniforms to wear, basic body armor. Though I don’t know if we have a helmet big enough to fit Howlett’s head.”

“Very funny,” Howlett mutters.

Erik lets the buzz of the continuing conversation wash over him as he thinks of the city, thinks of the post, thinks of places where he might be able to hide. “Rachel,” he says, suddenly, “You said the door downstairs is barricaded?”

“Inside and out, yes.”

“I can stay here,” Erik offers. “Just - make sure to lock me in.” 

“You are _not_ staying here by yourself,” Charles says, quiet but heated. “Someone must stay behind with you.”

“Leaving you one person short? No. Absolutely not.” Erik takes a deep breath. “You have six people and you will need every single one of them, and I know that you know that.”

“I know we said the building was pretty safe, Erik, but this is maybe going a little too far,” Sean begins. 

Erik holds up a hand, and Sean subsides.

He takes in the sharp hush of the others. 

He can hear Charles’s hands opening and closing convulsively.

He gathers his courage in his own hands.

“I won’t be alone. If the radio is functioning, if I can patch in back to the post, then they can watch out for me. They’ll know what’s happening to me.” 

The skeptical silence continues.

“If anyone comes for you here - ” Rachel begins, to the sound of Charles grinding his teeth.

He thinks about it.

Puts his hand back in his bag, and pulls out a familiar weight. “Charles. You know what this is. You know what I’m prepared to do with it.” 

“Your awl.” Charles’s voice is the flattest he’s ever heard it. “So - all the way back to that.”

“Yes.”

“Not this again,” Charles says. 

Erik opens his mouth to argue.

Charles speaks again, and the words are hard and piercing and not at all a surprise. “Too slow. They can stop you from using that. You need something that acts a lot more quickly.”

“Like what?” Erik asks.

“Like this.” Footsteps. Click and clack. Erik thinks of an orchestra sitting down, making minute adjustments. 

Someone in the room clears his or her throat, and someone else hisses in a breath.

There’s a step coming towards him, heavy and full of purpose, and Erik moves to meet that step.

Charles’s hands are heavy, and the shape he’s carrying is even heavier.

He’s never held one of these before, but he knows exactly what it is. 

“This is your solution, Charles?” he asks, honestly curious. “How is a gun any better than the awl? You objected to it on the grounds that it could be taken away from me. The same is true for this.”

“Not if you fired quickly enough.”

“At them or on myself?”

“On yourself.”

“And I might not even be able to accomplish that, since I’ve never had cause to wield one of these, not even when I could see.”

“We’ll be over there in the corner, making plans,” Howlett says, suddenly. “You two need to talk.”

“You’re not moving out without me,” Charles says.

“Of course not. I’m putting you between the bad guys and me.”

Charles snorts.

Erik steps carefully to his side, and gives his hand easily when Charles reaches for it. “He’s right. We do need to talk,” he says. He runs his fingertips over Charles’s skin, feeling out the tendons and the scars and the creased skin. “I - you’ve got to leave me here, Charles. Alone. You need all of them to watch your back. _I_ want all of them to go with you.”

Charles’s hands tighten around his, convulsive, and steadily growing painful.

Erik holds on, resolute, and then Charles blows out a long breath. His words come out slowly at first. “I would have wanted to wait. I would have wanted to hope for - more than this. If only to have someone stay here with you. Several someones.”

“There’s no one else here,” Erik says as gently as he can. “And there’s no more time for waiting; only time for acting.”

“I know. Just - Erik - ” Charles’s kiss is barely contained. Clashing teeth.

He could draw blood, and Erik would welcome it. Chase that acrid metallic taste on his lips.

“Come back alive, Charles,” is all Erik can say afterwards, as he tries to pull breath back into his starved lungs.

“I will - you promised you’d play the piano for me,” Charles whispers. His arms are still locked tightly around Erik’s waist.

Erik has to pry his own arms from around Charles’s shoulders. “Me and an entire orchestra, remember.”

“And music you wrote for me. More than enough reason to come back.”

Reluctantly he lets Charles go, and reluctantly Charles backs away from him, or so he thinks from the faltering quality of the other man’s steps. 

There’s a hitch in Charles’s voice, too, as he rejoins the others, as the intense whispering in the other corner of the room ebbs and flows and redoubles.

As for himself, he knows he has another task to do. He scuffs his feet. The echoes that come back to him are much quieter than they had been in Moira’s quarters.

Without his cane, he only has his ears and his own careful steps to navigate the room with. 

The floor beneath his feet creaks and cracks in places, and he walks as lightly as he can.

As soon as he reaches a wall he runs his sensitive fingertips over the cool surface, following it into the rest of the room.

The voices of the others grow louder.

“You’re almost at the table,” Armando offers after another moment or two. “Do you need help?”

Erik forces a polite smile, and shakes his head. “I’ll manage, thank you.”

“I’d have stayed here, watching your back, if it were possible,” Armando says. 

“Thank you. Please watch Charles’s, instead.” This table has recently been swept free of dust and of crumbs. The wood is smooth and a little damp beneath his hand. It makes it easy to find a familiar configuration of wires. The headphones are somewhat smaller than the set he’d used back at the post. The telegraph key feels new. More resistance on the moving arm.

Static hissing in his ears. “Charles, lend me Sean for a moment,” he says.

A series of shuffling footsteps. A yawn. Erik barely keeps himself from responding in kind. “If you’re going to ask about other attacks,” Sean drawls, “there haven’t been any.” 

“And enemy transmissions?” 

“Some. Not as much as we were expecting.”

“It’ll still give me something to do,” Erik says as he finds the tuning knob. “Thank you. And - be safe out there.”

Sean’s hand is heavy on his shoulder. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate the thought, but I’m really not the person you want to say that to.”

“I’ve already said all that needed to be said,” Erik says. “Now we have to do our respective jobs.”

“True.”

“Please make sure to barricade me in.”

“Yes,” Rachel and Monet say, almost at the same time.

Erik nods, once, and takes a deep breath.

Even with the indecipherable chatter of frequencies in his ears he can hear the others, though he doesn’t know what else they might be talking about. Charles’s voice, firm and steady, is the presence that underlines the coming and going and the constant metallic noise of weapons being prepared.

“I think that’s it,” Howlett says, eventually.

“Yes.” Charles’s voice. Erik shivers. He’s heard a tone like that before. Out of an enemy’s mouth. He remembers the sneer in Selene’s voice when he’d first met her. “We move out at sunset exactly.” 

///

Charles looks around at the others. At Monet leaning against one of the window sills. There’s nothing hurried about the movements of her fingers in her hair, the thick dark mass resolving into a complicated-looking braid. When she’s done with the braid she attends to the handful of throwing knives tucked into the various parts of her outfit: one down the back of her collar, two in each pocket, one in the top of her left boot, and the last strapped to her right forearm.

“Can you help me?” Rachel says, suddenly.

Monet tilts her head in inquiry. “Your hair?”

“Yes.” Rachel’s hair flares bright red and gold in the late afternoon light, strands shooting out every which way.

“Come here,” Monet says, and Rachel drags a chair over with her, sits down in it, head tilted forward so the other woman can work. “Comb?”

Rachel produces one from her pocket, missing several teeth and with a broken-off handle.

“Either you’ve used this as it should be used,” Monet says, a seemingly amused smile playing on her mouth, “or you’ve used it for _everything else_ except its actual stated purpose.”

“Not telling,” Rachel says, and without missing a beat she turns her attention to the gun in her lap.

Monet snorts, and starts to separate Rachel’s hair into marginally neater sections.

The gun in Rachel’s hands is very nearly a familiar gun.

Charles blinks away his surprise and the brief pang of worry, and points to the cut-down rifle lying across Rachel’s knees. “Is that - ” he begins. 

He can’t bring himself to say the names of the absent - the names of the missing.

And out of the corner of his eye he sees the line of Erik’s shoulders go rigid.

“I copied the design of Moira’s gun, yes,” Rachel says, and the words are a whisper in which hope and fear and anger are tied desperately together. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Charles can only nod. 

“It’s not the only piece I’m carrying; I’ll still be useful if this one blows up on me.”

“You’re useful; you’re needed,” Monet says. “And you’re the sniper, aren’t you?”

Charles watches Rachel blink. “Me?” Her eyes swing back in his direction. “I thought that was going to be someone else - ”

“You’ve the steadiest hands of everyone here,” he says. “As well as the most experience with rifles. Longarms, too. Not just that one, or Emma Frost’s kind of shotgun. Howlett told me you were good with the new gun, the one Jean and Betsy don’t like.” He has to swallow, hard, around the lump in his throat as he says the names. “So you have to watch our backs. Can you do that?”

Rachel curses, once, under her breath.

Charles meets Monet’s eyes, and does Rachel the favor of pretending he isn’t watching her dash the unshed tears from her face.

“I’ll do it,” Rachel says, the words both blurred with tears and much too hard, as though chipped from stone.

“Thank you, Rachel.” Charles nods, leaves her and Monet to it.

Sean and Armando are sitting on the floor next to Erik’s position at the radio. “...Uphill? In a storm? You’re far crazier than I thought,” Armando is saying.

“I had to be,” Sean says as he ties and reties the shoelaces on his boots. “If I hadn’t hurried we’d have had dead bodies on our hands. Boss-lady doesn’t like seeing dead people. It makes her really angry.”

Instantly Armando nods, as if in understanding. “I’ve heard some stories about your - about your section head. Hell on wheels, that one.”

“She is,” Sean and Erik say together.

Charles nods. “If we get out of this one, you and Monet are invited to the post. A little fresh air might do you some good.”

Armando shrugs and smiles, and there are no lines of worry in his face, but the way his hand tightens briefly around the stock of his pistol is a tell that Charles has seen in other soldiers.

He’s ready, he’s primed, he’s counting down the moments until it’s time to move.

As is Charles himself.

He checks the nearest clock, looks at Howlett who’s stationed himself next to the door. A foul-smelling fug around him, and dark smoke issuing from the cheroot clamped in the corner of his mouth.

Charles wrinkles his nose. “Must you?”

“It keeps me awake,” Howlett mutters.

“And it makes the rest of us stink.”

“Camouflage.”

“I doubt it. Something that evil-smelling would be blatantly out of place in the neighborhood we’re visiting tonight.”

Howlett makes a rude gesture in his direction. “Shut up.”

Charles makes the rude gesture back. “Time?”

“We’ll roll out as soon as I finish this.”

“Fair enough,” Charles says, and crosses the room again.

Sean and Armando slip deftly away, and Charles watches out of the corner of his eye as they gather up Rachel and Monet in their wake.

Now he and Erik are alone in this part of the room, and now he is standing directly behind Erik. He puts his hands on Erik’s shoulders.

Erik’s knuckles are white around the telegraph key, and his other hand is unmoving atop the radio. “What do you want me to say?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” Charles says, because honesty is all he has and because Erik is the only person he can show that honesty to, no matter what else he shows because of it. “And I don’t know what to say, either.”

“Then don’t say anything,” Erik says. 

Charles sighs, and leans forward. He breathes in the scent of Erik, the musk of him, and the hammering pulse in his skin.

He whispers something into Erik’s hair, and then he pulls away, strides past the others, walks out the door first. His hand on the stiletto he carries everywhere.

///

“Barricade the door,” Howlett’s voice says, and there’s a series of strange sounds and crashes.

When the echoes fade away, Erik is alone.

Even the static in his ears, however, is little more than whispering, because he can still hear and _feel_ Charles’s parting words.

_“It’s you, Erik. I never thought I’d find anyone. But I did. And that person is you. You’re here.”_

All he has is his unlikely whirlwind of a life, changed forever, and not by the accident. Everything shifting, nothing remaining in its original place. He feels like a piece of music that had originally been written for an orchestra and a choir, now rearranged for one instrument.

He takes his hands off his instruments. Pushes back from the table. Lets the headphones dangle loosely from around his neck. 

With only the room and its echoes for company, Erik suddenly begins to “play”. He throws himself into a stormy piece, something that sounds like drums marching to war, like the distant rattle and shriek of weapons primed to fire, and he knows he’s heard the music somewhere, perhaps on the radio, perhaps on the television. The name of the piece and the name of the composer slip through the cracks in his emotions. He’s grateful nevertheless, for the person who wrote the ominous rhythms of the piece, the martial precision. His heel strikes the floor, loud as the sound a gun makes when it’s cocked.

He’d never heard that sound before Charles, before Section 8.

Now he misses it. It’s become part of the background noise of his life.

The music rings out in his mind, together with the words that he hadn’t had the chance to say.

_“I’m with you, Charles. I’m here. If you’ll have me.”_

///

Charles grits his teeth against the potholes and the occasional reckless careening around street corners, and he can hear Monet swearing and Armando whistling cheerfully, so he resigns himself to enduring the rest of the ride in stoic silence.

The first few minutes had been spent in putting on the jumpsuit Monet had offered him, a little bulky in the chest area and around the torso, but otherwise oddly comfortable. It even has a high collar reinforced with three panels made out of metal, in case someone tries to slash his throat.

The canvas of the truck is ripped and torn in a few places, letting in bars of wayward fleeting light. 

He watches the expressions shift across Sean’s face, from manic to determined to panicked and back again.

Rachel’s eyes are closed, and her arms are folded over her chest, and she could almost be mistaken for someone sleeping, if it hadn’t been for her fists.

He thinks he must be learning something from being around Erik, because now he listens for the sounds of people’s hands, and he can hear the crack and twist of her tendons and bones now, even over the rattling in the truck.

Howlett merely lights another cheroot off the butt of the last one and keeps staring blankly at the space between his feet.

Charles wishes he could relax, but he knows he left part of himself behind at the safe house, behind two sets of barricaded doors.

So he goes over the plan again, over and over, and it’s like playing a game of chess except for the part where there’s more than one opponent controlling the other side of the board, and the part where Charles doesn’t know which side he’s playing.

The truck slows down, almost imperceptibly.

Monet whispers to them: “We’re in the suburbs, estimate fifteen minutes to the objective.”

“Then this is where I get down,” Rachel says, and she lifts a case from the floor of the truck. 

“Good luck,” Charles whispers in her direction.

She doesn’t reply, at least not in words. She just nods, and salutes, and as soon as the truck slows down she’s gone, climbing out with a rapid, reckless grace.

“Still think we should have sent a spotter with her,” Howlett says after the truck speeds up again.

“Again, there aren’t enough people, and there isn’t enough time to wait for people,” Charles explains.

“Better hope I don’t get my hands on Shaw first. He and I are gonna have _words_.”

Charles thinks that over for a moment. “If you get to him before I do, then you’re welcome to him. Just leave me something I can turn over to Emma Frost for interrogation.”

“She’s been after Shaw for such a long time,” Sean says, and the words are a hoarse whisper.

“That’ll be one hell of a show,” Howlett mutters.

“I agree,” Charles says. 

The truck brakes to a stop, smooth and silent and startling, and after Charles jumps out onto the sidewalk he spares a moment to spear Armando with a significant look. “You must have had a point, driving so recklessly.”

“Like everyone else here?” is the easy answer.

“A little more haste, a little less speed next time.”

“Next time, by which you mean, our getaway.”

“If we survive long enough,” Charles says, grimly, and he takes stock of their surroundings, then.

They’re standing near the beginning of a specific road, which will eventually take them to the house that was formerly Kathryn Worthington’s and will soon be hers again. 

Behind him, the others have just finished unloading the truck. He accepts the weight of a compact, heavy backpack, and fills the pockets of his black jumpsuit with extra ammunition - especially for the gun that he’d almost passed on to Erik. It’s holstered securely at his hip. 

He transfers his stiletto from the small of his back to a long, deep pocket in the right leg of his trousers, and he hopes that he won’t have to need it. He hopes the sheer number of guns they’ll be carrying will be enough.

He hopes that Rachel has found herself a safe perch, a high enough location that she’ll be able to see them and protect them and cover them - a place where she won’t be in danger of ambush herself.

He hopes that Erik is all right.

“Ready,” Monet whispers, breaking his reverie.

He nods at her, puts his finger to his lips, signals: Howlett nods, once, and sets off first, and Armando slips into position behind him, a careful trail and shadow.

Charles looks around once more at the failing light, now little more than a dream of distant pink above the horizon, and at the deepening shadows - at the bright cold sparks of faraway stars in the deep blue of the night sky - and he squares his shoulders, and strides off, with Sean and Monet walking tense and ready to spring.

///

Garbled signals, numbers and letters in dots and dashes, the pulse of electrical power.

Erik listens to the Section 8 frequencies and to the stations that he has identified as belonging to the enemy, and there is a part of him that is somewhere to the north, walking into the belly of the beast.

From time to time he hums to himself - bits of a familiar sarabande, the main idea from the _Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini_ , the guidelines for the cadenza that he intends to put in at the very end of _blue_ \- and the music, as it often has been, is his own, his only companion, in the place where he waits.

He thinks he might be able to understand what is going on: he thinks he might be gaining insight into Section 8, however elementary the thought might be. Every last man and woman - and agent, for that is what people like Moira and Howlett and Charles are - has a role to play, and they must have the time and the space to play out their parts.

He’s done his in providing bits and pieces of the information that went into the planning of Charles’s current venture, and so have the codebreakers, and - he swallows, convulsively, trying to stay with the thought - so has Moira’s delaying action. They’ve all played their parts beautifully so far, even though they haven’t heard any more news from that last group. 

Now Charles must play his part, and he can do that with assistance from Howlett and the others.

It ought to have been easy to understand.

But Erik’s hands are still shaking as he tunes up and down the frequencies.

When he starts to shiver from the falling temperatures and the strain of sitting unnaturally, he levers himself to his feet, and starts pacing. A measured circle, gradually widening.

He hasn’t had the chance to explore the room, and he takes the chance to do so now. To listen. Drafty echoes, faint and eerie, when he stops in certain corners. The entire building had sounded empty when he’d been led in, but now he can hear the wind as it mourns quietly, whirling just below what seems to be the high ceilings.

Every now and then he cocks his head back in the direction of the radio. Static and white noise. Blank, featureless, and making the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.

He touches a windowsill. Cold wood under his fingertips, coarse-grained and crisscrossed with deep ruts. The window itself has been covered over with paper, brittle and rough and imperfectly taped into place.

His circuit eventually takes him to the door. Some ghost of whatever Howlett had been smoking still lingers here, nothing at all pleasant, but still better than the cigarettes he remembers one of his first teachers smoking. Tobacco-stained hands and teeth, and terrible breath. He moves on.

In the silence of the room, he can hear the echoes of his own footsteps.

The wind begins to sigh again, and this time he can almost make out voices, and the voices are almost familiar. Female voices, two or three of them.

More than voices, he can hear words now, and not all of them sound happy.

Erik puts his hand over his heart, and creeps back to the door.

The footsteps far below are clear, and real, and they are not figments of his imagination. 

“Fuck,” Erik whispers. He knows that the table was left clear, that nothing was left to him - not even Charles’s gun.

He could go for his awl, but he might not have enough time - 

The voices are still whispering and still coming closer - 

Erik remembers climbing a series of square-spiraling steps, up towards this room, and he curses the barricade at the front door. Clearly it wasn’t enough, and clearly he’s dealing with people who may or may not be deterred by the barricade on the other side of this door - 

Knocking. A voice that could almost be familiar. “Erik. Let us in.”

Whoever’s come for him, they know his name.

He swallows, opens his mouth, and at first nothing comes out. 

He makes himself cough. The words dislodge themselves from the knot of fear in his stomach. “Who goes there?”

“Please open the door, Erik,” another voice says, different from the first. Pain dragging the words down, gently bleeding weights.

“Moira?” he asks.

“And Irene and Jean. Please, open the door. I can’t stay too long on my feet.”

“I can’t - if you’re on the other side of this door, then you know that they barricaded me in - ”

“I suspected as much.” A new voice, only it isn’t that, because he’s more familiar with it than he is the other two. Jean had been one of his companions at the post, though of the members of Charles’s team he’d met her last of all. “Then can we ask you to stand back?”

He flattens himself against the adjacent wall, just in time for the first kick to reverberate through the door. The vibrations of it crash against his senses.

Another kick, and another, and he hears the door crack.

“Enough,” Moira says wearily. “Just because we’re on the other side of it doesn’t mean it’s not a bad idea to keep this door barricaded in the first place.”

“Who put this together,” Irene complains. “I’m going to find them, and I’m going to tell them they did a good job, and _then_ I’m going to punch them.”

“Almost got it,” Jean says, and then - another quiet crash. The sound of the doorknob turning.

Erik takes another step out of the way.

A grunt of effort, a soft and pained gasp, and three hobbling sets of footsteps.

“There’s a chair,” Erik begins.

“Thank you,” Moira groans, and he listens to her labored steps moving away.

“It was a job and a half trying to figure out where you lot had gone to ground,” Irene says after she catches her breath. “We wouldn’t even have found you if we had been standing at the wrong intersection.”

“I don’t understand,” Erik says.

“We saw the truck, or whatever it was that Monet was in,” Jean says.

“You know Monet?”

“We went to school together, and I’d heard she enlisted.”

Erik walks over to the source of Jean’s voice. “Is it really you?”

“It’s really me, Erik. I’ve pulled you out of the depths of the post a few times. The time we talked with Jericho was only the first.”

He nods. He has to be satisfied with that. “Yes, it was.” 

“And it’s really me,” Irene offers.

“There is no such thing,” he says, carefully, “as enough ammunition.”

She barks out a brief laugh. “Yes. And that was the problem we ran into, back at the other quarters - ”

“No time for that now,” Moira says, and the heaviness of pain in her words is far, far outweighed by worry. “Erik, I know Charles went to the Worthington mansion. How long ago was that?” 

He thinks about it. “It’s been about an hour and a half since they left.”

“They’re in a hurry,” Jean says. “Did Charles designate anyone as a sniper?”

“Yes. Rachel.”

A soft whistle coming from Irene’s direction. “Betsy is going to have a hard time finding her; Rachel’s always been good at finding cover.”

“I give her enough of a headache as it is,” Jean says.

“One of you had better decide whether she’s going or staying,” Moira suddenly says. “Charles will need the extra help by the end of the night, but we do need to protect this place and Erik as well.”

Erik makes his way over to her. “Thank you,” he says. “But - you’re not all right.”

“No, I’m not. I still need to go to a hospital. All I can do is hope I’ll still have the use of my leg by the time this is over.”

“We wanted to take you to one of the safe doctors,” Irene begins.

“And as I believe I’ve just said, I’m needed here,” Moira says. “Decide, the two of you.”

Erik stays where he is. He gropes around on the table for the headphones he’d left behind; he tunes for the nearest Section 8 station and sends in his authentication code. _M calling._

He raises his eyebrows at the quiet squelch on the line, and the tension in his muscles draws in more tightly.

_FS is here, M. We hear you loud and clear._

“Is anyone here familiar with a Section 8 telegraph operator working under the initials FS?” he asks the others.

“FS and SF,” Irene says. “Fitz and Simmons. Two of Coulson’s protégés. Is that one of them on the line?”

“I was looking for Melinda and got FS instead.”

“That’s them,” she tells him. “I’ve worked with them before.”

He nods, and turns his attention back to the connection. 

_Is everything all right, M?_ is the message that clicks in his ears, repeating.

 _I am - well,_ he sends. _But the others have gone after Hornet._

There is a silence on the line, after he completes his sentence.

A silence that is broken by another series of signals, coming at a quicker pace. _Y for M, acknowledge._

_M is here, Y._

_Who are “they”?_

_CX took Wolf and a few others with him._

Another pause.

“I’m staying,” he hears Jean say.

Irene follows that up with “And so am I.”

“Then get busy,” Moira says. “One person to the window, if you can see anything out of it in the first place. One downstairs, next to the front door.”

“We didn’t damage that barricade - much,” Irene says. “I’ll try to see what I can do to patch it up.”

“There isn’t even a first aid kit in here,” Jean says after a few minutes. “Moira - ”

“I said, don’t worry about me. I’m not going to bleed out.”

“But you _are_ bleeding - ”

The line clicks once more in Erik’s ear. _M. This is Winter._

He’s never heard that before, but he doesn’t have to translate that name at all. 

He doesn’t have any words for the strange mixture of hope and fear that slides through his veins and down his nerves when he untangles that particular set of signals.

Emma Frost herself is on the line.

 _M is here, Winter, I copy._ He takes a deep breath, forces his hands to relax around the telegraph key. Tension like this will harm his fist. _CX is hunting Hornet tonight._

_Thank you for the heads-up. He won’t be hunting alone. I will send him backup._

_They left more than two hours ago,_ he tells her.

_Then the backup must hurry._

///

“I count a dozen guards on this side of the property alone,” Howlett mutters, and Charles can barely hear him above the rustle of leaves in the 

wind. “I don’t like this.”

“Paranoia,” Monet whispers, “or has your target been warned somehow?”

“We’ll say both,” Charles says. “It’s not important to me. We can play it smart.”

“Nothing else to do,” Armando says. “You just give us the word, Charles.”

“Take Sean with you,” he tells Armando without looking at him. His eyes are fixed on the mansion with all of its lit windows and sweet music filtering faintly out into the night in which they’re hiding. Piano music, he thinks, nothing at all as good as what Erik can produce. There is no soul in the music he’s hearing now. No life at all. “Go around the left side. Monet, Howlett, take the right. I’ll watch from here, and move in when you signal it’s safe.”

“What, you mean when we stop shooting?” Howlett snickers, and then he’s getting to his feet. “After you,” he whispers to Monet.

“Bet you a round of beers I can get more than you,” Armando says casually in Sean’s direction as they move out, as well.

Silence, and then - 

As if from an unimaginable distance he hears the first muted mutter of gunfire, and then the night is broken by shouts.

Again his thoughts loop back to Erik. The Erik in his mind is playing the _Goldberg Variations_ by candlelight. Just enough illumination to make out the movements of his hands, the nod and sway of his head as he leans into the music. 

Carefully, Charles gets to his feet, and tries to remember everything else that Erik has already mentioned about the house, and - 

Movement heading his way, the unmistakable shapes of muzzles tracking in his direction.

Charles doesn’t hesitate at all. There’s no more time to think. The image of Erik freezes in his mind, frozen between one movement and another, and it fades abruptly to black.

A precise burst of fire, and then another, and then a third. Three men fallen in his wake. 

He tracks toward another set of moving shadows, fires, dives for the ground and comes back up to cut someone’s legs out from under him with another series of shots.

On, making for the house. 

Footsteps behind him, too close, and it’s too late for him to turn around - 

The man chasing him falls down, and any outcry he might have made is muffled abruptly in the thick grass, and Charles risks a glance over his shoulder - and even in the difficult light he can see the hole in the back of the man’s head. Drops of blood on the grass.

“Thank you, Rachel,” he mutters, though there’s no one there to hear him, and he sprints for the house, for the nearest patch of wall.

More moving shadows in the garden - and from this vantage point he can now also see the shadows within the house. He has to stay out of sight, he knows that. He’s the wildcard in the plan they’ve hastily cobbled together from observations of Shaw and the odd caution that weighs him down every time he tries to consider Kathryn Worthington’s role in all of this.

Gunfire from the other side of the house, from deaths that he is not present for but is a witness to anyway. Until he knows that the others have finished their tasks he cannot join them. He has to continue to defend himself, alone when he must and with Rachel’s help when she can give it.

The shots echo in the night and he wonders that no one has cried out in shock and fear and gone to call the police, the military perhaps. Or is that the whole point of a place like this? Private armies and private arsenals?

A shadow stirs, far too close, and Charles drops into a crouch, weapon up and pointed into what has to be someone’s face - 

A sneer, discolored teeth, a scar in place of a left eyebrow - strange, the things he notices - and his assailant is bearing down on him, is far too near, and Charles drops his gun, draws his stiletto instead.

Rams it into the man’s gaping mouth.

Hot wet spraying his hands.

The man’s eyes go blank, and Charles struggles free from that dead weight, and someone is laughing from very close by.

Fear. 

Cold claws seizing at him.

He’s heard that laugh before, and he knows whose it is, and he still only has his stiletto to work with, now. He’s lost his gun - he wishes there was time to find it - but that laugh is too close. He’s out of options.

Hand around the knife.

He doesn’t really _choose_ to kill his targets with his knife. Things have just tended to turn out that way around him.

Charles scuttles for the nearest set of shadows and he doesn’t stop, doesn’t freeze, not even when someone says, “That’s as far as you’re going, isn’t it?”

He shakes his head, and puts his back against a section of ivy-festooned wall, and only then does he raise his eyes to meet those of his new opponent’s.

Or perhaps not a new opponent. 

Sebastian Shaw himself, with a gun in his hand and a rictus of a smirk on his face. He’s surrounded with people carrying guns, and none of them are looking at him.

“Hello,” Shaw says, “and I think we’ve met.”

“Not personally,” Charles mutters. 

“No, not that. Though you _have_ been quite busy, haven’t you? Cut quite the swath through my people. Ten men and women dead in just the past year alone, up to and including the man you knew as Raider. My, my, you’ve been busy. Tell me,” and Shaw shrugs, hefts the gun more casually, as though they were merely chatting in a corner of some high-society function of see-and-be-seen, “what’ve you got against me and mine?”

“You went after my people first.” 

“Did I? And who were these people?”

Charles refuses to rise to the bait. “You know who they are.”

Shaw sniffs. “And here I thought I could interest you in a business proposition. Call it a swap.”

Does he delay? Does he attack?

In the distance the chatter of gunfire recedes into near-silence.

Are the others all right? Are they still alive? Where is Rachel?

Delay. 

He forces himself to calm down. Forces himself to look the other man in the eyes. “What kind of proposition are you talking about?”

“Are you interested?” Shaw asks.

“I might be.”

“Hmm. No harm in talking to you about these things, is there, seeing as you’re in a fairly tight spot. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to have some insurance. You won’t mind, won’t you?”

Charles stares, horrified, as suddenly Shaw pulls his gun back up into position and fires, once.

He doesn’t scream, he doesn’t fall to his knees - but it’s a very close-run thing.

The impact to his shoulder feels like a thousand punches all at once. Panicked, he tries to move his fingers, and he feels the blood flow over his skin, towards his wrist. 

Even that tentative movement redoubles the pain, and he grits his teeth against it.

He desperately hopes that Shaw hasn’t just shot the nerves of his arm out. 

“Yes, well, sorry,” Shaw says, and he only looks contrite. Dead cold glittering in those barely-visible eyes. “Like I said. Insurance. Are we still talking business?”

Charles nods, once. He doesn’t trust himself to say anything.

“Good! Or, well, it might be a very bad thing for you and yours. Because I want you to bring me someone.”

“Who,” Charles asks, and he’s proud because his voice doesn’t waver, when it does come out.

“Did I say someone? No, I should have said _two_ someones. I want Erik Lehnsherr - alive - and I want Emma Frost. Her you can bring to me in whatever condition you can manage.”

“You mean you want me to kill her.”

“And bring me her head, certainly, if it’s not too much to ask.”

“That’s a lot to ask for.”

“Is it, when it’s your life you’ll get to keep?”

He stares at the death’s-head grin on Sebastian Shaw’s face. “Why - ” he begins.

“She’s in my way,” is the dismissive answer. “Has been for a while, now, though you don’t have to tell her that. Misplaced pride is not a good look on her. The number of hours I’ve lost having to plan around her little games and interventions - 

“And as for the pianist - I remember him, or at least I remembered him after Selene described him in such vivid terms - he seems to be valuable to an operation such as mine. Though we’ll have to do something about the part where he seems to hate me - I could make him dependent on me, perhaps. Put him in a wheelchair, chain him to a radio - ”

Charles very carefully does not see red.

Control is essential.

“I think that’s enough to be going on with,” Shaw begins again - but before he can continue, the gunfire starts up again - and from very close by, this time.

Someone stumbles to Shaw’s side - one of the women from the drinking party, the one who’d been reading in the poor light. A bloody ruin where her left hand used to be. “Trouble,” she gasps as she falls at Shaw’s feet.

“I already figured as much, what are you, useless?” Shaw asks, and then without any warning he levels his gun against her forehead and fires.

Muttering behind him. 

“Someone tell me what’s going on,” Shaw says, “or I’m going to keep shooting until you’re all gone.”

One of the men around him coughs and clears his throat and says, “We’ve got the original shooters - four of them - but we haven’t got the sniper yet.” 

“That wasn’t the sniper, you moron. _Who else is shooting at us._ ”

A shot rings out, and the man Shaw had been talking to is suddenly dead.

The reactions from Shaw’s people are predictable, to say the least: at least three of them start firing indiscriminately into the night. One of them falls down, apparently having fainted.

But it’s the man who fires in the direction of roof and gable who dies next, and at Shaw’s hands. “I said,” Shaw growls, “ _no one fires at the house._ ”

Charles looks in the direction of the nearest window, and as he watches another shadow flits by, curtains shrouding the form, human-shaped.

He raises an eyebrow in Shaw’s direction. “Who are you protecting in there? I didn’t even think you’d be capable of such a thing.”

“Don’t underestimate me,” is Shaw’s reply. He switches from black rage to seeming affability with such terrible ease. “I still have your life in my hands, remember. You haven’t said you’d come join me.”

“How negligent of me.” Thoughts whirling in Charles’s mind. Shaw’s men have his people. Someone else is here and hunting Shaw’s men. Shaw is protecting someone inside the house.

“Well?” Shaw asks, and Charles narrows his eyes at the impatience in that voice.

But before he can respond, there’s a sudden flurry of gunfire coming from behind him, and then Shaw is standing all by himself, because all of the people who had been standing with him are dead.

Blood on the grass, filling the night air with the bitter tang of copper.

A voice from _up in the tree_ , addressing him by name. “You’re Charles Xavier, aren’t you?”

Charles looks up, gritting his teeth against the pain that thunders down his veins anew. “And who wants to know? No offense, but - ”

“None taken,” is the easy answer. “We did take you by surprise, after all.”

 _Thump_ , and a man lands in the grass next to him. Pale hair, neatly parted to the side. Equal parts kindness and something _hard_ in those eyes. Broad shoulders and scarred forearms. “I’m Steve Rogers. Special Forces. Those are my colleagues James Barnes and Natasha Romanova,” he adds, pointing to the man and woman who are now standing over the disarmed and kneeling Shaw.

“Emma Frost sent us,” the woman - Natasha - says as she twists both of Shaw’s arms around to his back. Spare, efficient motions: she produces a rope from somewhere on her person and ties her prisoner up.

“I didn’t know she had a line to you?” Charles asks, looking askance at the trio’s various weapons. In addition to his rifle, Steve is carrying a pair of pistols. Natasha has no less than three bandoliers, half a dozen visible grenades, and another kind of rifle.

“We have - an understanding with Section 8,” the other man - James - says, and the words are accompanied by an ironic little grin. In stark contrast to the others he’s armed very lightly - if one could call brass knuckles, several short blades, and a wicked-looking cleaver-shaped knife on his belt _light_ weapons. “Emma Frost’s done us a fair few favors, so when she says jump, we ask how high.”

“Bucky,” Steve says, though there’s a laugh lurking in that word.

“What? It’s true,” James says. “Can’t argue with the results. How many times has the information from her group saved my life? I’ve lost count already. How many times has she saved yours?”

“How did she know to send you here?” Charles strides forward, and every step is agony, until he’s looking down into the mildly curious face of a bound Sebastian Shaw.

“Radio, of course,” Natasha says. “We were put in touch with someone from Section 8 called M. He has a pretty good fist - didn’t need to say a lot to tell me everything I needed to know.” 

M. Of course. Charles wishes he could smile, under the circumstances. 

Erik got him some help.

He forces his mind back to the mission, away from the room into which they’d barricaded Erik - but not without a last, wistful thought.

He hopes Erik is still safe.

“We’ve got to find the others,” Charles begins, “this man has my comrades - ”

A triumphant yell breaks the brooding quiet of the night.

Charles knows that voice well.

“One of yours, I hope,” James says.

Charles nods. 

“Let’s go around and find them,” Steve says, and then he comes over and seizes Sebastian Shaw’s collar, yanks him roughly to his feet, prods him forward.

Charles nods, positions himself immediately behind Shaw. “Move.”

More bodies on the grass.

“You killed all of them?” Charles asks as he steps around a heap of soldiers. 

“Not all. You’ve a sniper working with you, correct? We managed to find her, and her spotter.”

Charles glances at Natasha’s expression. “Spotter. There weren’t enough of us for her to have a spotter - ”

“They seemed to know each other,” James offers. He lowers his voice. “The one with the gun was named Rachel, and the one who joined her was named Betsy?”

Charles blinks.

Hope bares its teeth and starts to chew at him.

Betsy. Here. If she survived the night at Moira’s - dare he begin to think the others might have done the same?

Something new to worry about. A whole lot of plates to juggle. He has to set it aside. He has to keep moving forward. One thing at a time. Right now, he’s got to get to the bottom of the Shaw affair. He has to find the key.

He has to find Kathryn Worthington.

He grits his teeth again and rounds the corner of the house. A magnificent porch, graceful furniture - sinister shapes in the shadowed night.

But Howlett and the others are huddled together just off the steps, just illuminated by the lights coming from inside the house. The bruise on Sean’s face is in the shape of a particularly oversized fist. There’s a quiet sound of things being torn, and Monet is missing one of her sleeves as she wraps black cloth around Armando’s left hand. Howlett seems unscathed, as usual, except perhaps for the gaping tear in one leg of his jumpsuit.

“You’re alive,” Sean says, quietly, but he looks relieved and happy all the same.

Charles thinks the same expression must be on his face. “And I’m glad to see the rest of you are all right.”

“Hello, Natasha,” Monet says with a quiet smile.

“Why am I not surprised to see you here,” Natasha says warmly, and she comes forward, extracting a small black bag from her belt. “Anyone else besides Charles need medical attention?”

“Who got you,” Howlett asks.

“He did,” Charles says, indicating Shaw - who is watching them all with a kind of faint amusement in the lines around his eyes.

Howlett bares his teeth, briefly. “You let me know when you wanna give me a turn at kicking him around.”

“Later. Regroup first. Has anyone managed to make contact with Rachel?”

They all shake their heads. 

“Sean, go,” he says. “You know how to identify yourself to Betsy.”

“Betsy’s alive?” Sean asks.

“That’s what I want you to confirm for me.”

“I’m gone.” 

“Now sit down, Charles, we need to see to you,” Steve says, suddenly. “We can’t have you dropping out on us in the middle of this operation.”

Charles does, and gratefully bites down on the cloth pad that James offers him, as Natasha peers at his wounded shoulder. 

“How bad?” Armando asks.

“He’ll live,” Natasha says.

Charles makes a face at her.

She makes the face right back.

James makes a sound halfway between a snort and a laugh.

Charles growls softly as Natasha takes Monet’s other sleeve and presses it against his wound, then douses his arm in antiseptic. The burn of it stings like nothing he’s ever known before, worse than getting kicked in the face, worse than getting shot in the first place.

“Plans?” Howlett asks, abruptly. 

The pain recedes at a glacial pace. He thinks through it anyway. 

Erik would expect nothing less from him.

He swallows, hard, and he can still smell his blood and the antiseptic. “We’ll take Shaw in with us. I know he’s no use as a human shield. We need to keep an eye on him anyway. Armando, Monet, watch this door. If Sean comes back he stays here with you.

“Howlett, go around to the front of the house. Make sure no one’s going to surprise us from there.”

“I’ll go with him,” Natasha offers. 

“Be careful,” Steve and James tell her, at exactly the same time.

She might roll her eyes, but she touches both of their arms with what looks like affection before she marches off, leaving Howlett to stalk after her.

“Ready when you are,” Steve offers in the next moment.

“Shaw in front again,” Charles says as he gets to his feet.

“Naturally.”

///

A squelch on the line, and a series of clicks that Erik now knows translates to the word _update_. _SF for M. Latest news from Winter: backup has made contact with CX’s team._

He relays the news to the others; his voice shakes a little as he says Charles’s initials, and he can feel heat crawling reluctantly into his cheeks, but no one says anything, other than Irene, who lets out an oath that also sounds like a prayer.

Erik’s knees are none too steady, but there’s nowhere for him to sit, so he re-braces his hand against the table once again and starts keying back. _Thank you so much._

A quiet, gusty sigh from next to him.

That, too, he understands. “You wish that was us,” he says, mostly under his breath, in Moira’s direction. “You wanted to be on this mission with him.”

“Because I am fairly competent in a fight,” she says, “and I have _reasons_ to go after Shaw, and.”

He offers her his hand, and her fingers are rough and, worryingly, still a little wet when she takes it. “Yes, and.”

More clicking on the line. _Section 8 is responding to the request for - trucks. Three or four requested._

 _Can I ask you an impertinent question, SF,_ Erik sends.

_You may ask us another one._

_How are you getting the updates? Is a telegraph operator participating in the mission, and if so, would it be possible to communicate with them directly?_

The flurry of excited signals that answers him comes with a few errors, but he thinks he understands the gist of it:

_Yes, there’s an operator, we’re trying to raise them now, we’ll give them your station and identification, that is if Winter doesn’t take our heads off for disobeying direct orders._

Erik smirks, shakes his head, stays on the line. It’s the first moment of levity he’s had since he felt Charles walk away from him any number of hours ago.

“What’s the good word?” Moira asks.

“Fitz and Simmons are trying to connect me to the operator for the team that’s backing Charles up,” he says. “They don’t seem to be concerned that they’re going behind Emma Frost’s back.”

“That sounds like them,” Irene says. He wonders if he’s only imagining the odd fondness in her words. “I told you they’re Coulson’s people. And that’s one of the reasons why _she_ isn’t about to be taking them out. The other is because they’re entirely too good at the work that they do.”

“That sounds familiar,” Moira adds. “Doesn’t it, Erik?”

“Ask me again,” he says, “ _after_ I’ve actually started talking to this other operator. Right now, I’m just doing as I’ve been told: waiting for the next transmission.” 

That gets him a snort, followed by a quiet groan.

Before he can say or do anything further about Moira’s situation, the line clicks at him again: _FA for M - come in, M._

 _M here, FA, go ahead,_ Erik replies. 

_One moment I was talking to your people and the next I’m talking to you._

_Monitoring CX’s mission._

_You sure that’s allowed? I’m only supposed to be talking to FS or SF._

_It’s not,_ Erik sends, _but we’re the rest of CX’s team._

_He left you behind? That’s cold._

_Extenuating circumstances._

A pause on the line, and Erik takes advantage of it to ask, “Anyone know an operator going by the initials FA? He or she seems to know both Fitz and Simmons, and also recognizes Charles.”

“No,” Irene says.

“No,” Moira says. “But if he or she knows those two, we might be able to trust him or her.”

“Clumsy phrasing.”

“I know,” Moira says.

Erik shrugs, turns back to the line, waits for FA to contact him again.

///

Charles holds on to his knife with his good hand as he leads Steve in the direction of a muffled series of vaguely human sounds.

The tight-lipped expression on Shaw’s face could almost have been a welcome change from his grins, every one of them as smug as the last, and all hateful - except for the fact that he now won’t look anywhere but at his own two feet as Steve marches him through the Worthington mansion.

“For the last time, before I decide about whether I’ll take this knife to you or not - whose voice are we hearing,” Charles growls as he looks up and down yet another pair of intersecting corridors. “Who is it, and what have you done to him or to her or to them?”

Obstinate silence.

“Too many rooms,” Steve says.

“Most of which likely haven’t been opened in a while,” Charles says. 

“You sound like you’ve been in a place like this.”

Charles nods, once, and leaves it at that.

Unfortunately, the sound of their footsteps echoing in empty space is depressingly familiar to him.

They stop at a corner, and Charles presses his ear to the nearest door, and holds up a hand to Steve. “In here, I think.”

“I can barely hear anything,” the man complains, and Charles can’t blame him. He thinks it’s only the adrenaline and the pain screaming down his nerves that is allowing him to keep functioning. 

All he says now, though, is: “Then let’s hope it’s not a trap.”

“Or that who we’ve come to find is going to _stay_ alive.”

Charles takes up a position at the nearest door, waits for Steve to join him. “On three,” he whispers.

Steve holds up three fingers, folds one down, then another, then the third.

Charles takes a deep breath, moves to the door as quickly as he can. The impact of kicking the door open sends a fresh flash of pain rattling down his already screaming nerves.

The room is dark, and there are no windows, and there’s just enough light coming in from the corridor so he can make out the body huddled just past the edge of the door as it gapes open.

Charles doesn’t think, though he knows the danger: he squints at the wall, looks for the nearest light switch, hits it with the butt end of his stiletto.

The face of the man on the floor is covered with blood and matted hair and overlapping bruises.

“What the hell - ” Steve says, and he sounds shocked, and Charles can’t blame him for that either. “I know who this is.”

“So do I,” Charles says, and carefully he listens for the huddled man’s faint gasps for breath. Carefully he shifts the man into a three-quarters prone position. “So this is where Warren Worthington III has been.”

“According to the newspapers he’d gone away for a brief vacation,” Steve mutters. Almost as an afterthought, he shakes the man he’s still holding. “But of course you’d know something about the truth of it, wouldn’t you?”

Shaw says nothing. Charles is not surprised.

Worthington groans, and his eyes flutter open, and he whispers, “Help me - mother - downstairs - ”

“How are you even still alive?” Charles asks, but that’s as far as he gets. He looks at his useless arm, and at Steve’s burden, and then sweeps the room with his eyes. There’s a chair in the corner, and it even looks sturdy enough, so he beckons Steve over. “Do you have any more rope?” 

“Yes. I took the extra coil that Bucky was carrying.”

“Good, then tie Shaw up into that chair over there. Hand and foot. Use your best knots, I don’t care if you hurt him, just secure him as best as you can. I don’t want him hopping away.”

That gets him a smile full of purpose and sharp edges.

While Steve busies himself with almost cutting off Shaw’s circulation, Charles lifts Worthington’s head up carefully, so he can breathe and speak, and that ravaged voice is still whispering. “Mother - dangerous - ”

The words make Charles grit his teeth. “What can you tell me about the danger? Who is threatening your mother?”

“You don’t understand - ” Worthington breaks off, coughing violently. A dribble of blood trickles from the corner of his mouth. “She’s not - in danger. She _is_ the danger.”

“Explain,” Charles growls.

///

The line clicks angrily in Erik’s ears and he taps back, little caring that he makes mistakes along the way. _What is going on?_

 _Our people and yours are on the move, M,_ FA is sending. _All guns drawn and ready. I was under the impression they’d dealt with the opposition. Apparently not._

“Inside the house?” Moira asks when Erik relays the news to her. “Then Charles has found something.”

“Or someone,” Irene says. “It makes me think about something you were working on, Erik.”

“Me?” he asks.

“You and Charles worked on both of the Worthington dossiers,” she says. “I can understand looking into the son - but why investigate the mother as well? Does he think she might have something _else_ to do with Genosha - ?”

“Or with the leadership of Shaw’s group or groups,” Moira says. “The change in tactics. The fact that Section 8 is reading their transmissions in the clear.”

“And her connections to the Providence government,” Erik says, slowly, sounding out the ideas. “Charles must have had his suspicions, though he didn’t tell me anything.”

“He didn’t tell me anything, either,” Moira says. “He kept that one close to his chest.”

“I don’t think I’d blame him,” Irene says. “If we follow this line of reasoning through to its logical conclusions, we’re looking at - ”

“At a coup,” Erik says. “And the wedding would have been just the beginning.”

A grim silence descends, and it is only broken by the sudden sound of clicking on the line, disjointed, but it works out to: _Gunfire, we’ve got gunfire!_

///

“Prisoner secured,” Armando reports as he finishes blindfolding Sebastian Shaw. “Howlett and I’ll take him out.”

“Don’t hurt him - too much,” Charles says. “We still have to have something left of him to question, after all.”

“Yeah, yeah, stop it, I get it already,” Howlett growls. He’s none too gentle as he simply picks the chair with its human cargo up, and starts walking away.

“Not much of a stretcher, but it’s better than nothing,” Monet says, next, and she looks at Sean, who is ashen-faced. His hands clamped around his bloody knee. “Ready?”

“Just _go_ ,” Sean growls.

“The mobile post’s disguised as a food delivery truck out the eastern gate,” Natasha tells her. “You can’t miss it. Sharon and Sam are on board.”

“You have a radio set?” Sean asks. 

“Yes, Sam is our operator.”

“Charles?”

He nods at the redhead. “Updates to Section 8, then get Rachel and Betsy. The three of you will watch over the mobile post while we’re busy here.”

Charles watches them move off, and then turns back to the others. “From the little Warren Worthington III was able to tell us, we might be facing quite a bit of resistance in there.”

Natasha nods. A ghost of a smile flickers across her face. “I know the names,” she says. “Flemyng and Selene, correct?”

“Yes.”

Her smile widens. “Well, that’s what we’re here for.”

Steve nods, and James cracks his knuckles and murmurs, “Damn right.”

“Well,” Charles says. “Onward then. I hope you don’t mind protecting me.”

“Not your fault you’ve been shot; it’s a wonder you’re still lucid,” James says.

“Who says I am?”

And then the words die away, and he meets each of their gazes in turn, and they form up on him, and start moving through the corridors.

He’s used to working on his own, with little chance of backup except after everything’s been said and done, and now he’s watching the steady and methodical sweep of their guns, as they move in a tight knot towards the room that Warren Worthington III had indicated: the music room.

Up ahead, James whispers, “Clear,” and they advance.

Behind him, Steve and Natasha are whispering tersely to one another.

They turn the last corner, and Steve strides up to the door. “Charles, you had better take one of Natasha’s other guns.”

“I only have the use of one hand; I’d be a danger to myself and to you if I handled a gun now,” Charles murmurs.

“Then what are you going to use to defend yourself with? That knife?” James asks, with an incredulous look on his face.

Charles gives him a tight smile. 

“Leave him alone,” Natasha says after a moment. “Can we just finish the work, please.” 

“All right,” James says, reluctantly. “How are we going in?”

“Everyone down while I knock,” Steve whispers, and Charles drops into a combat crouch. Four powerful blows.

“Any moment now,” Natasha says, flat on her belly on the floor - 

A wild burst of gunfire. A huge hole in the door. 

“GO!” James shouts, and Steve charges forward. The chatter of his gun seems too quiet compared to the earlier blast. The shouting from the people who go down is louder than that gun.

Charles thinks he might recognize the long, angry cry as Selene’s.

Natasha dashes forward, smooth and precise movements, and every time she fires someone falls, including the huge man towering over the rest, who is only halfway through tracking her movements when she shoots him - twice in the head, once in the center of his body.

“Clear, Buck,” Steve shouts.

“Fucking finally,” is James’s response, and he crouch-runs past Charles and disappears into the haze of shadows and smoke. 

Someone else manages to get a shot off - it doesn’t seem to faze him, and Charles squints at James’s shadow, watches him wrestle someone down. A wordless shout, and James hissing. “Don’t struggle, you’re only going to hurt yourself.”

“Clear,” Natasha says. 

Charles looks back over his shoulder. The ruined door and the empty corridor beyond. 

He steps forward.

The first thing he sees is the beautiful bulk of a piano - riddled now with bullet holes. “Fuck.”

“Did the piano mean anything to you?” Natasha asks as she reappears at his side.

“Not to me,” Charles says, and he almost surprises himself with the anger in his own words. He thinks of the expressions that had crossed Erik’s face as he talked about rediscovering music, as he talked about tuning this very same piano.

Charles stomps forward, now, around the ruin of the piano, and he stops himself just before he brings his foot down onto the woman fighting James’s steady grip. She’s held down with a boot on the back of her neck, and hands on her wrists.

“You’re Kathryn Worthington,” he says.

“Where is Sebastian? _What have you done to him?_ ” Her face is twisted in hatred and anger. “You’ve killed him!”

“Don’t you worry about him,” Natasha says sweetly. “He’s alive. At least I think he was, the last time I saw him.”

“We didn’t treat him as badly as you and yours did your own son,” Charles says. He has to take a deep breath, he has to clear his mind, before he goes on. “I just wanted to know: did you really think it was necessary to do that to him?”

“He was in my way,” Kathryn Worthington says.

“Yours, or Shaw’s?”

“Mine,” she hisses. “All that talk about saving lives, about helping people. What do I care about Providence? Providence _is in my way_. It’s always been.” 

“I don’t understand,” Natasha says. “As far as I know, your family’s always held a share of the power within Providence, as well as outside - ”

“Power that belongs to me,” the woman says, “not to my mother, not to my son, not to my husband. None of them know how to use power. Do you, Charles Xavier? Oh, I know who you are. I’ve always known. Why are you in my way? You’re ruthless, you’re cunning, you’re a dangerous man - and you’re capable - you know how to lead. Why aren’t you using that power of yours? Why are you following? You should be leading. You should be working with people like Sebastian, with me - ”

“Let us pretend for a moment that I would turn my back on my country and on my comrades, and that such an act would not instantly render me unfit to be any kind of leader,” Charles snaps. “Let us pretend for a moment that I would even consider working with the people who think nothing of murdering the people I work with, much less my countrymen. _That I would even consider joining the people who killed my brother._ Let us pretend for a moment that I would even be able to work alongside a woman who sees nothing wrong in selling out her country, in harming her own offspring. Should I go on? Does that still make me a leader? Perhaps in your eyes, yes, it would.

“But you’re not thinking your own words through, Kathryn Worthington. You call me a fool for following others, for following orders? Would I be doing any differently were I to be working with you? Would I not be more than a well-favored lackey, _who would still be following orders_? The only difference is that they’d be coming from you. And what commends those orders? What makes them better? Your convictions? Your ideas of right and wrong?”

He growls. He wants to spit, but the house has already been desecrated enough for one night. So he contents himself with saying, “Your ideas of right and wrong are complete and utter _bullshit_.”

“You’re not holding back, are you,” Steve observes, mildly. He shifts to stand more comfortably when Natasha walks over to him and sits down more or less on his right foot.

“People have died because of her. I might not have all of their names, I might only have known a bare handful of them, but Providence has suffered because of her and because of Sebastian Shaw.”

“All true,” Natasha says. “So finish up here and we’ll take her out. At least one part of this entire nightmare can be over.”

“It’s never over,” Charles says, and he blinks in surprise when another voice says mostly the same thing.

“Always the cynic, aren’t you, Buck,” Steve says, but while he does look admonishing he also looks - sober, as though they were all just having a conversation about necessary and painful truths.

“Compared to Natasha I’m all sunshine and rainbows,” James mutters. 

That startles a quiet laugh out of Steve, and a smirk and a thumbs-up from Natasha.

“I’m all out of rope now,” is the next thing that James says. “What are we going to use on this one?”

“And if we’re done here,” Steve says, “might I suggest you get that shoulder of yours looked at, Charles.”

Charles swallows, hard. The adrenaline rush has long since worn off.

But there are still a few more questions to ask.

He stumbles his way over to the piano bench - despite the bullet damage and at least one splintered leg, it miraculously doesn’t buckle under his weight - and briefly he thinks of Erik sitting here and filling the room with the power of his creation, of the music that he loves - and fixes Kathryn Worthington with another hard glare. “Care to tell me what you were going to do at your own wedding? Guns, perhaps? A bomb? Poison?”

The only answer he gets is a snarl, and Kathryn Worthington trying to crawl towards him.

Charles gets off the bench, and looks over his shoulder. “I don’t trust that look in her eyes,” he says. “Natasha. Could you do me a favor? Please search her thoroughly.”

“You think she might be carrying something?” James asks, and while he can’t step aside as Natasha drops easily to the floor next to their captive, he does keep holding her down, though now he uses his knees as well.

Charles watches Natasha’s hands moving, and bites his tongue against reminding her to be careful.

“This is interesting,” Natasha finally says, and she draws a small, leaf-shaped blade from the woman’s sleeve.

Even in the bad light of the ravaged music room, Charles can see the darkened edge, the smear or stain on the point.

“Don’t taste it,” Steve warns. “We had to take you to the hospital the last time - ”

Charles raises his eyebrows at Natasha’s downturned mouth. “It only happened the once.”

“You don’t have to taste it anyway,” James adds. “I can smell it. I know what’s on that blade: it’s cyanide.”

Charles takes a deep breath. “I can’t smell it.”

“Not everyone can. But trust me on this one. Cyanide.”

Natasha gets to her feet and puts a hand on her hip as she glares down at Kathryn Worthington. “Were you going to use that on people on your wedding day?” 

All the answer she gets is bared teeth.

“There might be more of that around here,” James says, pointing at the knife that Natasha is still holding. “We’ll have to let the cleanup crew know.”

“We can call them in, if we’re done here,” Steve says.

“Almost,” Natasha says. She raises an eyebrow at James. “Pick her up, please.”

Charles asks the obvious question. “You’re not going to bind her?”

“Don’t need to,” she says, and when Kathryn Worthington is up and dangling at least a good inch up from the floor, Natasha strikes, her hands a blur in the semi-darkness of the room: throat and temple and chest, and Sebastian Shaw’s intended bride only has time for one gasped breath before she falls unconscious.

“Nice,” Steve says, nodding appreciatively.

“Maybe you should come to Section 8 and give lessons in that,” Charles says.

“You couldn’t afford me,” Natasha laughs.

Before they leave the room with their burden, they make a circuit of the bodies: Charles can’t help but nod grimly in satisfaction once he makes sure that Shaw’s lieutenants are truly dead. Blood pools around Flemyng’s spread-eagle form. Selene, on the other hand, seems unharmed except for the bullet through her throat. 

“I wish Erik could see this,” he says, almost to himself.

“That’s a strange thing to say. Can I ask why you want someone to see this?” James asks.

“Not all of this. Certainly not the piano; he was working on that piano, and now I don’t think it can be saved,” Charles says. “No, I want him to see Selene. She very nearly got to him before we did. It might make him feel better to know that she’s dead.”

“I see.” 

He’s following the others over the bloodstained grass when he stumbles, and he sees the grass rushing up to meet him, and he hears both Steve and Natasha’s voices calling his name.

“Erik,” he whispers, just before the world goes black.


	16. Chapter 16

Erik shuffles his feet, though he knows the echoes in this little room well enough already. 

The movement warms his feet, his chilled knees, but not by much.

There is scant comfort to be found in the penetrating silence all around him: no beep to signal the continuing beat of Charles’s heart. No whistle-whine from a ventilator working to pump air into Charles’s lungs. No steady to-and-fro of doctor’s steps or nurse’s.

All in all, this is actually a better situation than the one in which he’d once found himself, because in addition, he knows that Charles hasn’t been restrained at all.

He knows this because it’s his hand that’s pinning Charles’s wrist down to the thin hospital sheets.

He can put his fingers on warm skin and feel the strong, steady beat of Charles’s pulse.

Steady as the swing of a metronome - and Erik thinks of _blue_ , and of the final sections, all powerful flourishes and elaborate ornaments, the only way he can show how complicated and brilliant he thinks Charles is - 

A knock on the door. The sound caroms up and down his nerves despite its quietness. 

“Come in,” he calls, just as quietly.

“It’s me,” says a familiar voice. 

“You shouldn’t be up yet,” Erik immediately says. “Who helped you escape from your bed this time?”

“I bribed one of the nurses,” Moira murmurs. “I was going crazy in there. I can’t stand looking at the same three walls and ceiling. I wonder how Charles manages it.”

“By sleeping,” Erik says, shortly, and he clasps Charles’s hand in both of his own. “He has it better than either of us ever did.”

“You were a terrible patient, too?”

He merely tilts his head in the direction of Moira’s voice, the source lower than it should be, and he knows that she’s in a wheelchair before the metal frame stops next to him and he can reach out to the cracking leather cushion on the nearest arm.

“All right, all right, point very much taken.” There’s a sound of rustling and a small, involuntary groan. 

“News?” Erik asks, presently, partly to distract himself and partly to distract her.

“Yes,” Moira says. “Hmm. When you return to the post, you’ll be working with Fitz and Simmons. Apparently you’re to train them, and they’re to help you get better.”

“Is that supposed to be a good thing or a bad thing?”

“Well, when Irene explained the two of them to me, I thought I understood why people talked about them in a very specific way. They _talk_ , Erik, about anything and everything, and usually they even talk all over each other. From everything else I’ve heard, it’s like they’re one person in two bodies, one mind, though it’s not a conventional one at all.”

He shrugs and shakes his head. “I can always ask Jericho to open one of the anechoic rooms for me.”

“Ugh, how can you even like the idea of those places,” Moira says. 

“Watch it, Moira,” Erik says with a grin, “you’re coming close to calling Emma Frost unusual, too, because she likes those rooms as well.”

“That’s a given, isn’t it? You can’t run Section 8 and be all in your own right mind. So many secrets. So many compartments. Secrets within secrets.”

He remembers Charles talking about this exact topic. “That sounds like all of us.”

“It does.”

A pause. Charles keeps on breathing, slow and deep and steady. 

“Kitty says she was there to see Kathryn Worthington and Sebastian Shaw arrive at the post,” Moira continues after a long pause. “In separate convoys, several hours apart, mind. They’re being held in two different buildings, too. No one’s taking any chances with those two. Last Kitty heard, the lady’s been put into a straitjacket.”

“That bad?” Erik asks.

“Worse, since there’s an addendum to the dossier from Romanova of Special Forces. The word from that report is - chilling, to say the least. She was prepared to kill her own son, among other things and other potential victims. But don’t let that fool you. The frightening thing is that she’s perfectly lucid. Perfectly logical. It’s just that the things coming out of her mouth are - ”

“Are completely incomprehensible,” Erik finishes. “I’m familiar with the concept. Selene sounded like that, too.”

“I’m glad that one’s dead.”

“So am I. But you wish you’d pulled the trigger yourself.”

“It will just have to be one of my regrets.”

Another knock on the door. A quiet, severe voice, which Erik has heard every day. “Miss MacTaggert, please return to your assigned room,” says one of Charles’s doctors. “You are supposed to be resting. Not overexerting yourself.”

“Which I am not doing, doctor, since you can see I’m still in the wheelchair.” 

“Be that as it may, we do not want you to aggravate your wounds any further.”

“I’ll stay put, I promise,” Moira says. “I just want to see my friend.”

A sigh. A quiet step forward. “Hello, Erik,” the doctor says.

“Hello, Doctor Banner,” Erik says, trying to keep the worry out of his voice. “How is he?”

“Let me just check his vitals,” is the answer, soothing and quietly brisk.

Erik tilts his head to follow the doctor’s movements, but the sounds don’t mean anything to him, except for the scratch that sounds like pen on paper. 

He wonders what the doctor is writing down, and what those words could mean for Charles.

“He’s recovering quickly, but he’s still suffering from the after-effects of fatigue,” is the final pronouncement. “We’ll take him off the sedatives now, let him get some more natural sleep. Depending on how much more rest he might need, he should be up and about in another day or two.”

“And what about releasing him?” Moira asks.

“We will see,” is all the doctor says, and then: “Is there anything else?”

“No, thank you,” Erik says.

The doctor’s footsteps recede, eventually, and Erik takes off his sunglasses and lays his forehead against Charles’s unmoving arm. 

“Look after him, Erik, and look after yourself,” Moira says, eventually.

“I’ll do my best,” Erik says.

“Give me your hand,” she says, and he does. 

She doesn’t linger. He listens to the soft thrum of her wheelchair moving away.

He hums, and as he hums he does something he hasn’t done in a long time.

He prays.

///

Waking up is a slow slog, a struggle up a steep and seemingly never-ending hill.

But he tries, because he can hear a voice murmuring nearby. A familiar voice, rising and falling, tantalizing rhythm.

He could almost know the music, Charles thinks.

He tries to turn in the direction of that rise and fall - but pain flares up in his shoulder, bright white blinding. His heart races. Panic, slashing at his nerves. He can’t help but groan, and he grits his teeth to prevent the sound from escaping - 

“Charles,” says the voice. “Charles, take a deep breath, and _calm down_.”

He knows that voice, and knows that it’s the right thing to do as it says. He fights the rising tide of his fear. He breathes, more carefully, and then - he opens his eyes.

A shadow on its feet next to the hospital bed. Sunglasses despite the darkness. An extended hand, an ear tilted his way.

Charles knows who this is.

“Erik,” he says, and the memories crash down onto him. “The last time I was awake - I was saying your name.” 

“Were you?” Erik leans in, and Charles reaches out to him with the hand that he can move. Stubble on Erik’s cheek. Lines in his face that weren’t there before. 

In the almost nonexistent light of the hospital room, Charles has to rely on his sense of touch to find Erik’s eyebrows, knit tightly in worried knots. 

“You’re awake,” Erik whispers.

He would answer, but just then his throat closes up on him, and the next breath is rough and rasping and too dry, and he has to turn away and cough.

Erik’s fingertips on his face, searching patiently and carefully for his mouth - and when Erik finds it, he offers Charles a full cup of water. “No talking until you finish that,” he says.

Charles smiles, takes the cup from Erik’s hand, sips at it carefully. The water is lukewarm, and it tastes flat, but he finishes it and asks for more. “And - could you turn the lights on?”

Erik reaches unerringly for the light switch on the wall. “Close your eyes,” he says. 

A _click_ , and soft glow flickering into existence.

Charles blinks rapidly. Opens his eyes. 

Erik is tapping the pitcher, and seems to be listening to it, and he pours carefully into the glass - pausing every so often to tap that item as well. 

When the glass is handed back to him it’s just a little more than half full, and he drains it dry again, before whispering, “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. How do you feel? Should I call the nurse?”

“Please don’t,” Charles says. “I intend to spend the first few moments of being awake - being with you.”

That wins him a smile, and Erik’s hands wrapping around his own. “I’m glad you’re awake, Charles.”

“How long was I - ”

“The better part of four days.”

Charles winces. “That long?”

He watches Erik nod, once, looking grave.

“I am so, so sorry, Erik. I’ve made you worry so.”

“Not just me. Moira has been coming in every day.”

“Is she all right?”

“The doctors managed to save her leg. From what I understood of it, she was shot several times, and that was just the start of it. She got all the others out alive: Irene, Betsy, Jean - and then she found my location, and watched and waited with me for the end of your work.”

Charles can feel his heart stutter and lurch, painfully, and he grips Erik’s hand and says, “I think you had better tell me everything about that night.”

Erik nods. “It was relatively simple for us, I would say,” he begins. “As I said, Moira found me, and she and Jean and Irene waited with me in the building. I managed to establish contact with, first, Fitz and Simmons of Section 8, and then an operator with the initials FA, from Special Forces - ”

Charles squeezes his hand. “Samuel Wilson, yes, I met him that night. He mentioned he was communicating with someone from Section 8. I also talked to our backup. Natasha mentioned your call sign.”

A soft sound. Charles stares at Erik, and at his sheepish small smile. “What?”

“About that,” Erik tells him. “Emma Frost might need to shout at me. FA - Samuel? - was supposed to be talking to Fitz and Simmons only. I asked the two of them to patch me in.”

Charles peers at the lines in Erik’s face. “Because you were worried about me.”

“Because I needed to know what was happening to you. I won’t mind the reprimand. I just wanted to make sure that there was some way of knowing what was going on.”

He can’t help but smile, and somehow he manages to reach out for Erik’s collar. He pulls Erik in close, brushes a kiss against Erik’s forehead. “It was - you did the right thing, I think. Even though you must have been told about my blacking out - ”

“Yes, I heard it from Samuel directly,” Erik says, gentle and worried. “He told me his companions brought you in, that they attempted to wake you up.”

“Adrenaline crash,” Charles says. 

“Please tell me, Charles, please - what happened to you? Who shot you?”

He can feel his lips tightening into a straight pinched line. The pain is still reverberating up and down his nerves, though more faintly now, and easier to push away.

He takes a deep breath. Looks directly at Erik. “Sebastian Shaw shot me, Erik. He had me dead to rights. I would have been killed, if it hadn’t been for the others.”

Erik starts, bares his teeth, but subsides before Charles can tell him to calm down.

So Charles continues with the story. “Shaw made me an offer that he must have thought sounded good to him: he said he’d let me live, let me work with him, if I gave him two lives in payment.” He takes a deep breath. “He wanted you alive, and Emma Frost dead.” 

Shock and surprise on Erik’s face. “Me. Why me?”

“Selene told him that you were a valuable asset to Section 8.”

He watches Erik shake his head. Denial writ large on him. “I couldn’t have - ”

“I know,” Charles says. “And I wouldn’t have allowed it. He - he wanted to make sure that you’d be unable to escape him, had you been delivered to him.” He lets the anger seep into his voice, now. “He wanted to maim you, chain you - I couldn’t stand hearing it. I _couldn’t_ \- ”

Arms around him, now, tight, holding him close. “I would never have believed that you’d give me to him, Charles. You’d - you’d have helped me run. Or helped me die. You’d have done that for me.”

“I would die,” Charles murmurs, holding on to Erik with his one good arm, “before ever I betrayed Section 8. Before ever I betrayed _you_.” 

“I know.” 

There is such certainty in Erik’s voice, and Charles can’t help but stare at him, admire him, marvel at him. 

“How can you even think about me that way?” The question falls from Charles’s lips before he can restrain it, before he can reword it. “I - the things I’ve done - ” The mad need rises in him, makes him want to confess: he has to lay his sins at Erik’s feet, so Erik can see him for who he really is.

And Erik, bless him and curse him, leans over and whispers, “Tell me about the things you’ve done.”

Charles stares at him, and the words stumble and trip all over themselves. “I wanted to be the one to kill Selene. I wanted to look her in the eyes as she died. Someone else killed her: Steve or Natasha. I don’t know which one of them did it, and I want to know, and I don’t want to know.” He fights for his breath. “I told Steve that I didn’t care if he hurt Shaw in securing him. I stood idly by as Natasha hit Kathryn Worthington.” More words. “I’ve killed people, I’ve hurt them and left them bleeding, left them for dead - ”

“You defended me from Selene,” Erik says, and Charles snaps his mouth closed, completely cut off at the knees. “That was you. I was there. I heard her. I heard _you_. I was afraid of you, Charles, until I understood what it was that you weren’t saying.”

His mouth runs dry as he takes in the serene conviction on Erik’s face. He can barely get the next words out. “Which was?”

“I understand Section 8,” Erik says gently, still holding on to Charles’s good hand, “and I understand many of the choices you and yours make. I should say, me and mine. I’m Section 8, now, just like you. And I know why you and I and Moira and Irene and Sean and Howlett make the choices we make. I know what Janos died for.” Steady, soft, sincere. “We do what we must. We do what we can. And we do everything in our power, the good things and the bad. Because if we do not do these necessary and needful things - people who are not you and me, people who are innocent, who don’t know anything, will be hurt.

“And you could never live with that. You could never allow that to happen. It would be unthinkable for you.

“Now I know that I feel the same way.” A smile, tentative, a little bit crooked.

Charles hangs on, helplessly, to Erik’s strong hands. 

“Or I could be wrong,” Erik whispers. “So tell me, Charles. Are we on the same page? Do we want the same thing?”

Brave blind beautiful Erik.

Waiting for Charles.

“Erik. I just - please understand. I wanted to kill people. For you. Is this what you want? Am I? I never even told you about David. My brother. Sebastian Shaw had him killed. I was doing things because I wanted to avenge him, and now I want to do things because I want to defend you and keep you alive, and not all of those things are what any sane mind would consider as _good_ \- ”

Far from shrinking away, far from pulling his hands away, as he plows through his words the smile on Erik’s face grows and shivers and widens. 

“Erik,” Charles says, at last. “Are you even listening to me?”

In response Erik touches him, five fingertips over his heart. “I am paying attention to you, Charles. I am listening to every word you say.”

“Then why are you smiling?”

“Because - ” Erik falters, sobers, and Charles feels his heart lurch, for a long and infinitely painful moment. “- Because I know nothing of your brother. You’re right, you haven’t told me about him. But you want to fight, you want to _kill_ , in his name, and now in mine. It makes sense to me. It is - _right_ , in my mind.”

He stares at Erik for a long, long moment.

“Why?” The question is pulled out of him as though on barbed wire.

Erik bows his head, but the words ring clearly in Charles’s ears: “Because I would do something much the same for you. Find a way to fight. Find a way to win. Find a way to keep you safe and as close to me as I possibly can. I can do that. I can keep doing that. All I need are these,” and in rapid succession he taps a fingertip against his own ears, the back of his other hand, and his own chest. Over his heart. “All I need.”

And Charles remembers Erik’s return, sitting primly in the hotel’s tea room among delicate china and indelicate conversation and the threat hanging over his life. “You came here to help me when your own life was in danger.”

“Not because Emma Frost asked me,” Erik says. “I could have stayed at the post and done my work there with the new instruments. I didn’t want to be so far away from you. I came here of my own free will.”

“...Yes,” Charles says, helplessly.

Silence falls between the two of them.

“I’m here, Charles,” Erik says, eventually. “And here I’ll stay until you answer my question.” 

“Your question. Yes,” Charles says again. “You want to know if you and I want the same thing.”

“Yes.”

After all, it’s easy to choose.

After all, it’s right to choose.

“It’s a dangerous life, Erik.”

“I know,” Erik says, looking unperturbed.

“There is still a wearyingly long list of people who might want us dead.”

“Shaw was only the first, for me,” Erik says. “I do not mind dealing with the others.”

“And there will be days and nights on which I cannot be with you. I will be called upon to perform the tasks that are suited to my abilities and to my skills.”

Erik flashes a smile at him, quick and amused. “What makes you think you’re the only one?” 

Charles blinks, and - slowly, carefully - returns the smile. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I - I don’t actually know why I’m objecting. I do want to be with you, and I do want to want the same thing you do. I’m just - ”

“Afraid,” Erik finishes. “As am I. I thought I knew what fear was, when I was standing on the street and couldn’t move, could only watch the car as it sped forward. But waiting for you during the mission - I tasted a different kind of fear. Something with more teeth and more pain. It’ll be part of my life from now on. But it’s a price I’m willing to pay, to be with you.”

There are no possible answers to that, and all Charles can do is pull Erik close once again. “Kiss me,” he whispers against Erik’s mouth. “Kiss me.”

“Do we want the same thing, Charles?” Erik asks.

“ _Yes_ ,” Charles says, at last, and he kisses Erik, lets himself be kissed, holds desperately on to Erik.


	17. Chapter 17

Even as he takes his seat at the end of the second row, Charles shies back from the burning bright lights, the powerful glitter and flash of reflections everywhere around him, from the ostentatious parure the woman on his right is wearing to the gleam of the great black piano at center stage. 

But that’s not all he can feel. The anticipation from the audience that is noisily filing into the seats is almost a physical thing, as is the sense of being crushed by the weight of the famous and the notorious alike, all come to this showy, red-velvet-and-gold theater for one man.

The orchestra begins to assemble onstage: men and women in sober black. Trills and notes and the quiet bass-boom of the timpani as it is tested. 

Someone behind Charles whispers appreciatively about the concert harp - he gathers that it’s supposed to be quite old, and quite frail - and that it was specifically requested by the night’s featured performer.

That makes him smile, and look down at the program in his hand. 

Below the names of the orchestra and its leaders is one in simple italics.

_Erik Lehnsherr_   
_In his return to the stage_

Some of the pieces listed for tonight are familiar, and some are not: Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor “Quasi una fantasia”, Chopin’s Waltz in D-flat major, McCreary’s _Prelude to War_.

But it is the final text printed in the program that Charles concentrates on now.

_World Premiere_   
_“blue”_

Someone stops nearby, and Charles looks up into the face of Emma Frost with no more than a polite smile, neutral and cool. She is dressed in white silk and diamonds, and the hems of her magnificent fur coat fall nearly to the carpeted floor.

“Good evening,” she says, touching her throat and her wrist.

He returns the gesture as unobtrusively as he can. “Good evening.”

He looks over his shoulder after Emma Frost is seated, and nods at Jean, who is sitting several rows back. Her bright red hair contrasts powerfully against her green gown and her golden earrings.

The others are scattered throughout the audience. Charles raises his hand to wave when he spots Steve and James and Samuel in their tuxedos at the other end of the row behind his.

Other faces around him, other movements, other people taking their seats.

Warren Worthington III in his wheelchair, surrounded by women with sharp eyes and elbow-length gloves.

Angel Quested takes her seat, and looks uncomfortable doing so - her eyes darting around the crowd, around the glittering theater.

A little girl in a lace-trimmed dress, clinging to her companion’s hand, an excited smile on her face. 

“Please take your seats. The concert will begin in five minutes.”

The lights go down, the conductor steps onto the podium, and the audience applauds - but none more so than Charles, none more enthusiastically, when Erik strides confidently out of the wings. He approaches the conductor, exchanges a few words with her - and then shakes her hand, as well as that of the head of the violin section.

Just before he takes his place at the piano, Erik stops, turns toward the audience, and then - he smiles.

Charles smiles back.

Fingers poised above the keys, a hot electric anticipatory silence, and then - Erik begins to play.

**Author's Note:**

> credits  
> > The original premise of the film _The Silent War_ involved the main character getting back his sight and then deliberately, traumatically, giving it up again. The film also killed the woman who had recruited him in the first place, whom he seemed to have true feelings for. I didn’t want to do either of those things in this fic, and so this is a zig-zagged kind of AU with two male leads and a far larger supporting cast than the original had.
> 
> > I have tried to be careful and conscientious in writing this version of Erik, who is completely part of the world in which he lives and eventually finds himself. Any and all mistakes in his depiction and his reactions to his environment, as well as any and all mistakes with ableist language, are my fault, and I apologize to those I might have offended.
> 
> > For me, this particular round of XMBB started off with tears and heartbreak and far too much difficulty: I’d had at least three ideas in mind - and started writing one of them - before discarding everything and starting over and, eventually, getting to this particular fusion. Seeing the movie _The Silent War_ was a complete happenstance, and a fortunate one. I’m glad I got to see it, and I’m really glad that the premise and the characters eventually led me into this huge, huge fic.
> 
> > Phil Coulson and other _Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD_ characters made it in because it made perfect sense for them to be part of an intelligence agency; and the characters of _Captain America: The Winter Soldier_ were the perfect Special Forces team, and so I’m glad to have had an opportunity to have them show up here.
> 
> > This is, by far, the longest thing I have ever written. The ups and downs of writing it could have made a story all by themselves. Thank goodness for slack time at the office, and thank goodness for friends who have very, very good taste in music, as they helped pick out some of the piano pieces I used to write this thing to. To the people on Twitter who led me to check out the Moonlight Sonata by Beethoven as well as other great pieces of music that will surely continue to be performed and heard and paid attention to, thank you. 
> 
> > As mentioned above, this fic has had a particularly difficult genesis, and the friends who made it possible are really, truly, awesome and magnificent, because this time, I really could not have done this without them.
> 
> This is my third straight collaboration with [madsmurf](http://madsmurf93.tumblr.com/). She is a genius, and she is wonderfully supportive, and she is just plain amazing. I just went along with her ideas for all of the graphics and other accompanying media. Thank you, madsmurf, thank you so much for believing in me.
> 
> Huge thanks to [arisupaints](http://arisupaints.tumblr.com/), who picked me and Maddie up from XMBB claims proper, for helping bring these characters to life. It’ll be kind of hard to get over the way she portrays these versions of Charles and Erik, because she brought them to life so completely, so clearly, and so breathtakingly. Thank you so much for your spectacular art.
> 
> The beta readers for this story were [luninosity](http://luninosity.tumblr.com) and [afrocurl](rozf.tumblr.com), and I am immensely grateful for the eagle eye they brought to bear on my grammar, characterization, and word choices. This year I was more afraid as I wrote because the work I do was actually starting to negatively affect my own writing, and my own use of the English language. So thank you both for working with me and making this so much better as a result, even though it was so damn huge.
> 
> I couldn’t have done this without the steady support, the enthusiasm, and the wisdom of [ang3lsh1](http://ang3lsh1.tumblr.com) and [onnasannomiya](http://onnasannomiya.tumblr.com). 
> 
> For providing visual inspiration, I am very grateful to [slories](http://slories.tumblr.com) and [trobador](http://trobador.tumblr.com).
> 
> > There were other ups and downs in my life behind the scenes of this fic, and I suspect there will always be something of that in the things that I write, but I wouldn’t change a thing, mostly because my husband means so much to me and does so much for me and with me. He is still the inspiration - and this time, he was even the inadvertent cause for this whole story, because it was by his doing that we found ourselves in a place where we could watch _The Silent War_. Thank you, beloved.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Theme and Variations: War - The Graphic Art & Fanmix](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2249253) by [madsmurf](https://archiveofourown.org/users/madsmurf/pseuds/madsmurf)




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